e glory of the aurora as it encircled the
region of the unrisen sun.

Nevertheless my comrades sang their way home through the sullen gloom.
Sometimes I wakened the echoes of those desolate old hills myself with a
stave of "Sally's the gel," although I was suffering a good deal from my
darker thoughts of what the damnable hypocrisies of life might be doing
with my darling, and my desire to take my share of her trouble whatever
it might be.

The sun returned the second week in August. Nobody can know what relief
that brought us except those who have lived for months without it. To
see the divine and wonderful thing rise up like a god over those lone
white regions is to know what a puny thing man is in the scheme of the
world.

I think all of us felt like that at sight of the sun, though some
(myself among the rest) were thinking more of it as a kind of message
from friends at home. But old Treacle, I remember, who had stood looking
at it in awed solemnity, said:

"Well, I'm d----!"

After that we got on famously until we reached Winter Quarters, where we
found everybody well and everything in order, but received one piece of
alarming intelligence--that the attempt to get into wireless
communication with our ship had failed, with the result that we should
have to wait for her until the time originally appointed for her return.

That did not seem to matter much to my shipmates, who, being snugly
housed from blinding blizzards, settled down to amuse themselves with
sing-songs and story-tellings and readings.

But, do what I would, to me the delay was dreadful, and every day, in
the fever of my anxiety to get away as soon as the ice permitted, I
climbed the slopes of old Erebus with O'Sullivan, to look through
powerful glasses for what the good chap called the "open wather."

Thank God, our wooden house was large enough to admit of my having a
cabin to myself, for I should have been ashamed of my comrades hearing
the cries that sometimes burst from me in the night.

It is hard for civilised men at home, accustomed to hold themselves
under control, to realise how a man's mind can run away from him when he
is thousands of miles separated from his dear ones, and has a kind of
spiritual certainty that evil is befalling them.

I don't think I am a bigger fool than most men in that way, but I shiver
even yet at the memory of all the torment I went through during those
days of waiting, for my whole life seemed to revolv