to the furnace-room, to return directly.

"Take that, sir."

"What is it? Lump of coal? What for?"

"Throw it right out on the ice, sir. I want you to try it. Quick!
there's something for you to look at now."

"But surely there's no ice for it to fall on," said Steve. "It's
impossible."

All the same, he took the lump of coal, and, drawing back, threw it as
far as he could out over the fiord; and, to his utter astonishment, when
it fell he heard it rebound with the regular musical ring of a hard
substance upon ice, and strike again and again before it became
motionless.

"Why, the ice must be quite half an inch thick!" cried Steve. "No
wonder I felt cold."

"Yes, sir, it's freezing hard; the winter has begun, though of course it
will be warm in the fine days. But look; there's a sure sign of the
cold weather coming."

He pointed to the northward, where the Great Bear shone with a
brightness foreign to that which he would have seen at home.

"What am I to look at?" said Steve; "that soft light? It's the Milky
Way."

"No, sir, the aurora. There it goes; it is spreading right along."

"Then it's the sun going to rise!" cried Steve.

"In the north-west, sir? No, it's the aurora; you will see it stream up
in rays right away to the Pole Star soon. Yes, I thought so;" for, even
as he was speaking, sheaves of thin pencils of soft lambent light
streamed right away up toward the zenith, then sank, wavered about, and
then streamed up once again.

"Finer than I should have expected, sir," said Johannes, as the glow
near the horizon increased till it was now pale white, now of a delicate
blush, while the pencils of light flickered up and streamed and waved,
and looked in their delicate, dawn-like colouring like the spirits of
fire or light flying upward from earth to heaven.

"What is it?" said Steve at last, after gazing at the wondrous
phenomenon for a long time.

"Ah, sir, you must ask some one wiser than I am to answer that question.
All I can tell you is that cold weather generally comes after the sky
has been lit up as if it was the inside of some great shell, and with as
many colours, only more light and faint."

The aurora flashed up brighter and then sank, flickered as if dying out,
and then blazed up again, if the term can be applied to the exquisitely
soft, lambent glow playing in the north; but its movements were those of
leaping flame flashing up from a huge fire, growing exhausted, and t