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g." I stepped to the window, and there, sure enough, piled up beneath it and against the house, was a great bank of snow, which the summer's sun had not yet dissolved; and as I saw this, and then looked beyond it over the wretched little village, and the desolate waste of rocks on which it stood, and then on up the craggy steeps to the great white-topped mountains, I could but wonder what strange occurrence had sent this luxury-loving man, with books only for companions, into such a howling wilderness. Was it his own fancy? or was it some cruel necessity? In truth, the surprise was so great that I found myself suddenly turning from the scene outside to that within, not indeed without an impulse that the whole thing might have vanished in the interval, as the palace of Aladdin in the Arabian tale. My host was watching me attentively, no doubt reading my thoughts, for as I turned round he asked if I "liked the contrast." To be quite candid, I was forced to own myself greatly wondering "that a den so well fitted for the latitude of Paris should be stumbled upon away up here so near the Pole." "Hardly in keeping with 'the eternal fitness of things,' eh?" "Precisely so." "You think, then, because a fellow chooses to live in barbarous Greenland, he must needs turn barbarian?" "Not exactly that, but we are in the habit of associating the appreciation of comfort and luxury with the desire for social intercourse,--certainly not with banishment like this." "Then you would be inclined to think there is something unnatural, in short, mysterious, in my being here,--tastes, fancies, inclinations, and all?" "I confess it would so strike me, if I took the liberty to speculate upon it." "Very far from the truth, I do assure you. I am not obliged to be here any more than you are. I came from pure choice, and am at liberty to return when I please. In truth, I do go home with the ship to Copenhagen, once in three or four years, and spend a winter there, living the while in a den much like what you here see; but I am always glad enough to get back again. The salary which I receive from the government does not support me as I live, so you see _that_ is not a motive. But I am perfectly independent, have capital health, lots of adventure, hardship enough (for you must know that, if I do sleep under a sky-blue canopy, I am esteemed one of the most hardy men in all Greenland) to satisfy the most insatiate appetite and perver
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