ars, was above him.

Perhaps in no other land can nature in her varied aspects of sublimity
and grandeur as regards celestial phenomena, be better studied than in
the wild north-land. Her cyclonic storms in summer and her blizzard
blasts in winter are at times not only terrific in their destructive
power, but they are also overwhelmingly grand in their appearance.

Then her "visions of the night" are at times sublimely beautiful. Her
star-decked vault of heaven, absolutely free from all mists and fogs and
damps, seems so high and vast. The stars glisten and twinkle with
wondrous clearness. The flashing meteors fade out but slowly, and the
moon is so white and bright that her shadows cast are often as vivid as
those of the sun in some other lands.

But nothing equals a first-class field night of the mysterious aurora
borealis. No other phenomenon of nature in magnitude of display, in
varied brilliancy of colour, in bewildering rapidity of movement, in
grandeur so celestial, in its very existence so unaccountable, is
calculated to lift man up and away from things earthly, into the very
realm and presence of the spiritual, as does a first-class display of
the northern lights, as seen in the far north-land. While they are
generally more frequent in the winter months than at other times of the
year, yet they are very uncertain in their comings, and sometimes burst
upon the world and illuminate and fill up with celestial glory the brief
hours of some of the short summer nights.

To Oowikapun, in his mental darkness and disquietude, there came one of
these more than earthly visions of entrancing beauty. If in any one of
nature's phenomena she could speak to a troubled soul, surely it would
be in this. For while to Elijah the answer was in the still small
voice, yet man unaided by divine revelation prefers the earthquake and
the fire, or some other grand, overwhelming manifestation of nature's
power, which appeals to the sensuous rather than to the spiritual.

To these Northern Indians the auroras have ever been associated with the
ghostly or spiritual. In some of the tribes the literal translation of
the northern lights is the "spirits of their forefathers going out to
battle."

The display that Oowikapun gazed upon was one of more than ordinary
sublimity. He had left his little wigwam which nestled among the
balsams, and had gone out from the forest gloom and had seated himself
on the shore of the lake where t