ll attempt to blow your nose with a poplar chip. We
could not bare our hands a minute, without feeling an iron grasp of cold
which seemed to squeeze the flesh like a vice, and turn the very blood
to ice. In other respects we were warm and jolly, and I have rarely been
in higher spirits. The air was exquisitely sweet and pure, and I could
open my mouth (as far as its icy grating permitted) and inhale full
draughts into the lungs with a delicious sensation of refreshment and
exhilaration. I had not expected to find such freedom of respiration in
so low a temperature. Some descriptions of severe cold in Canada and
Siberia, which I have read, state that at such times the air occasions a
tingling, smarting sensation in the throat and lungs, but I experienced
nothing of the kind.

This was arctic travel at last. By Odin, it was glorious! The smooth,
firm road, crisp and pure as alabaster, over which our sleigh-runners
talked with the rippling, musical murmur of summer brooks; the
sparkling, breathless firmament; the gorgeous rosy flush of morning,
slowly deepening until the orange disc of the sun cut the horizon; the
golden blaze of the tops of the bronze firs; the glittering of the
glassy birches; the long, dreary sweep of the landscape; the icy nectar
of the perfect air; the tingling of the roused blood in every vein, all
alert to guard the outposts of life against the besieging cold--it was
superb! The natives themselves spoke of the cold as being unusually
severe, and we congratulated ourselves all the more on our easy
endurance of it. Had we judged only by our own sensations we should not
have believed the temperature to be nearly so low.

The sun rose a little after ten, and I have never seen anything finer
than the spectacle which we then saw for the first time, but which was
afterwards almost daily repeated--the illumination of the forests and
snow-fields in his level orange beams, for even at midday he was not
more than eight degrees above the horizon. The tops of the trees, only,
were touched: still and solid as iron, and covered with sparkling
frost-crystals, their trunks were changed to blazing gold, and their
foliage to a fiery orange-brown. The delicate purple sprays of the
birch, coated with ice, glittered like wands of topaz and amethyst, and
the slopes of virgin snow, stretching towards the sun, shone with the
fairest saffron gleams. There is nothing equal to this in the
South--nothing so transcendently rich