quality of feldspar, the hornblende
appears as actinolite, (ray-stone,) so called from the form of its
crystallization; while the quartz element is faintly present, or appears
in separate masses. The purple of the hills is due not only to the
labradorite, which has that as a stable color, but also to a purple
lichen, which clothes much of the rock on this coast. I found also fine
masses of mica imbedded in quartz, edge upwards, and so compact that
its lamination was not perceptible. Indeed, I did not, with my novice
eyes, immediately recognize it, for it appeared a handsome
copper-colored rock, projecting slightly from the quartz, as if more
enduring.

Next day there was trouting, with a little, and but a little, better
than the usual minnow result.

And on the next, the floe-ice poured in and packed the harbor like a box
of sardines. The scene became utterly Arctic,--rock above, and ice
below. Rock, ice, and three imprisoned ships; which last, in their
helpless isolation, gave less the sense of companionship than of a
triple solitude. And when next day, Sunday, the third day of July, I
walked ashore on the ice with a hundred feet of water beneath, summer
seemed a worn-out tradition, and one felt that the frozen North had gone
out over the world as to a lawful inheritance.

But the new Czar reigned in beauty, if also in terror. Yard-wide spaces
of emerald, amethyst, sapphire, yellow-green beryl, and rose-tinted
crystal, grew as familiar to the eye as paving-blocks to the dwellers in
cities. The shadows of the ice were also of a violet purple, so ethereal
that it required a painter's eye at once to see it, though it was
unmistakably there; and to represent it will task the finest painter's
hand. Then the spaces of water between the floes, if not too large,
appeared uniformly in deep wine-color,--an effect for which one must
have more science than I to account. It is attributed to contrast; but
if thus illusive, it is at least an illusion not to be looked out of
countenance. No local color could assert itself more firmly. One
marvellous morning, too, a dense, but translucent, mist hovered closely,
beneath strong sunshine, over the ice, lending to its innumerable
fantastic forms a new, weird, witching, indescribable, real-unreal
strangeness, as if the ice and the ships it inclosed and we ourselves
were all but embodied dreams, half come to consciousness, and rubbing
our surprised moon-eyes to gaze upon each other. The