laughed Donovan, who greatly enjoyed
their mystification.

"The sea is like blood!" exclaimed Wade. "You don't suppose the day of
judgment has come and caught us away up here in Hudson's Straits, do
you?"

"Not quite so bad as that, I guess," said Raed. "I have it: it's the
aurora borealis; nothing worse, nor more dangerous."

I had expected Raed would come to it as soon as he had got his eyes
open.

"A red aurora!" said the captain. "Is that the way you explain it?"

"Not a red aurora exactly," returned Raed, "but an aurora shining down
through the thick fog. The aurora itself is miles above the fog, up in
the sky and probably of the same bright yellow as usual; but the dense
mist gives it this red hue."

"I've heard that the northern lights were caused by electricity," said
Weymouth. "Is that so?"

"It is thought to be electricity passing through the air high up from
the earth," replied Raed. "That's what the scientific men tell us."

"They can tell us that, and we shall be just as wise as we were
before," said Kit. "They can't tell us what electricity is."

"Why!" exclaimed the captain, "I thought electricity was"--

"Well, what?" said Kit, laughing.

"Why, the--the stuff they telegraph with," finished the captain a
little confusedly.

"Well, what's that?" persisted Kit.

"What _is it_?" repeated the captain confidently. "Why, it
is--well--Hang it! I don't know!"

We all burst out laughing: the captain himself laughed,--his case was
so very nearly like everybody's who undertakes to talk about the
wondrous, subtle element. By the by, his definition of it--viz., that
it is "the stuff we telegraph with"--strikes me as being about the
best one I ever heard. Kit and Raed, however, have got a
theory,--which they expound very gravely,--to the effect that
electricity and the luminiferous ether--that thin medium through which
light is propagated from the sun, and which pervades all matter--are
one and the same thing; which, of course, is all very fine as a
theory, and will be finer when they can give the proof of it.

After watching the aurora for some minutes longer, during which it
kept waxing and waning with alternate pale-crimson and blood-red
flushes, we went back to our bunks; whence we were only aroused by
Palmleaf calling us to breakfast.

If there was any wind that morning it must have been from the east,
when the crags of the island under which we lay would have interrupted
it. Not a breath re