n; and the lustrous intensity of his vision as
he grasped some new fact corroborative of some favorite theory, might
well have stirred a sympathetic interest even in a mind of
unscientific proclivities.

An hour after noon the three wanderers returned from their wintry
excursion, Maurice calm and radiant, the ebony-faced Jake sore-footed
and morose, and young Gudmund, the guide, with that stanch neutrality
of countenance which with boys passes for dignity. The sun was now
well in sight, and the silence of the glacier was broken. A thousand
tiny rills, now gathering into miniature cataracts, now again
scattering through a net-work of small, bluish channels, mingled their
melodious voices into a hushed symphony, suggestive of fairy bells and
elf-maidens dancing in the cool dusk of the arctic midsummer night.

Fern, with an air of profound preoccupation, seated himself on a ledge
of rock at the border of the ice, took out his note-book and began to
write.

"Jake," he said, without looking up, "be good enough to get us some
dinner."

"We have nothing except some bread and butter, and some meat extract,"
answered the servant, demurely.

"That will be quite sufficient. You will find my pocket-stove and a
bottle of alcohol in my valise."

Jake grumblingly obeyed; he only approved of science in so far as it
was reconcilable with substantial feeding. He placed the lamp upon a
huge bowlder (whose black sides were here and there enlivened with
patches of buff and scarlet lichen), filled the basin with water from
the glacier, and then lighted the wick. There was something
obtrusively incongruous in seeing this fragile contrivance, indicating
so many complicated wants, placed here among all the wild strength of
primitive nature; it was like beholding the glacial age confronted
with the nineteenth century.

At this moment Fern was interrupted in his scientific meditations by a
loud scream of terror, and lifting his eyes, he saw a picturesque
combination of yellow, black, and scarlet (in its general outline
resembling a girl), fleeing with desperate speed up the narrow path
along the glacier. The same glance also revealed to him two
red-painted wooden pails dancing down over the jagged bowlders, and
just about to make a final leap down upon the ice, when two determined
kicks from his foot arrested them. Feeling somewhat solicitous about
the girl, and unable to account for her fright, he hurried up the
path; there she was aga