he deep blue shadows of "A
Polar Winter Night." Two polar bears stand in a great expanse of snow;
the moon's rays fall across rocks and project their outline in black
shade. The snow is wonderfully rendered--thick, soft, and glistening,
after a recent fall.

"Looking for the Reindeer--Evening" shows a snowy landscape with a
firmament of yellow. In "The Cold Became More Severe" gray plains are
seen beneath a sky of clear apricot. "A Halting Place" has a dark
blue-gray sky, brown-gray ice, a belt of snow, and a range of hills
with patches of brown rock showing beneath the snow. Two polar bears
lying dead on the ice in front are admirably done; and the whole
picture is full of stern romance. The romantic quality of Borissoff's
best pictures comes, in part, from the fact that he makes us
understand that people live in these awful places--or have lived!

Such is the suggestion of "The Last Survivor." It shows a desolate
shore where, after an exceptionally severe winter, a band of poor
hunters had perished. Reverently the survivors had interred their
dying comrades--until the last man died! A solitary white fox
surrounded by a few bleaching bones is the central feature of the
haunting picture.

[Illustration: "IN THE MIDNIGHT SUNSHINE"]

For the most part, the pictures are small canvases, depicting
glaciers, icebergs, snowdrifts, coast scenes, and the tundra in its
ever-varying color-aspects, winter and midsummer, spring and autumn,
with its Samoyeds, their tents, boats, sledges, reindeer, dogs, and
foxes. Every imaginable atmospheric effect is given, from the
wonderful glow of the midnight sun, to raw, hanging fog that can be
well-nigh felt. Of the splendid richness of these effects and, quite
as much, their baffling gradations, the painter never tires of
telling. "One beauty of this strange nature," he says, "is the
extraordinarily soft variety of tones, that can only be compared to
the reflections of precious stones. And God preserve the artist from
trying to follow conventional ideas as to tones and effects that may
have happened to strike him as universal in the past! Offended nature
will elude him. It is only by divesting oneself of prejudice that one
can render these wonderful harmonies."

THE TAVERN

BY WILLA SIBERT CATHER

In the tavern of my heart
Many a one has sat before,
Drunk red wine and sung a stave,
And, departing, come no more.
When the night was cold without
And the ra