ectator
diminished. In Alaska perhaps more than any other country it is the
heavens that declare the glory of God and the firmament that shows His
handiwork, and the awestruck Indian who comes with timid inquiry of the
import of such phenomena is rightfully and scientifically answered that
the Great Father is setting a sign in the sky that He still rules, that
His laws and commandments shall never lose their force, whether in the
heavens above or on the earth beneath.

[Sidenote: THE STRONG COLD]

The "strong cold" itself is an awe-inspiring thing even to those who
have been familiar with it all their lives; and a dweller in other
climes, endowed with any imagination, may without much difficulty enter
into the feelings of one who experiences it for the first time. It
descends upon the earth in the brief twilight and long darkness of the
dead of winter with an irresistible power and an inflexible menace.
Fifty below, sixty below, even seventy below, the thermometer reads.
Mercury is long since frozen solid and the alcohol grows sluggish. Land
and water are alike iron; utter stillness and silence usually reign.
Bare the hand, and in a few minutes the fingers will turn white and be
frozen to the bone. Stand still, and despite all clothing, all woollens,
all furs, the body will gradually become numb and death stalk upon the
scene. The strong cold brings fear with it. All devices to exclude it,
to conserve the vital heat seem feeble and futile to contend with its
terrible power. It seems to hold all living things in a crushing
relentless grasp, and to tighten and tighten the grip as the temperature
falls.

Yet the very power of it, and the dread that accompanies it, give a
certain fearful and romantic joy to the conquest of it. A man who has
endured it all day, who has endured it day after day, face to face with
it in the open, feels himself somewhat the more man for the experience,
feels himself entered the more fully into human possibilities and
powers, feels an exultation that manhood is stronger even than the
strong cold. But he is a fool if ever he grow to disdain the enemy. It
waits, inexorable, for just such disdain, and has slain many at last who
had long and often withstood it.

On those rare occasions when there is any wind, any movement of the air
at all, there enters another and a different feeling. Into the menace of
a power, irresistible, inflexible, but yet insentient, there seems to
enter a purposeful, v