e in minutest detail how it all came to be? It would be mere
words. We know no more what an electric current really is than what
the aurora borealis is. Happy is the child.... We, with all our views
and theories, are not in the last analysis a hair's-breadth nearer
the truth than it.

"Tuesday, November 13th. Thermometer -38 deg. C. (-36.4 deg. Fahr.). The ice
is packing in several quarters during the day, and the roar is pretty
loud, now that the ice has become colder. It can be heard from afar--a
strange roar, which would sound uncanny to any one who did not know
what it was.

"A delightful snow-shoe run in the light of the full moon. Is life a
vale of tears? Is it such a deplorable fate to dash off like the wind,
with all the dogs skipping around one, over the boundless expanse of
ice, through a night like this, in the fresh, crackling frost, while
the snow-shoes glide over the smooth surface, so that you scarcely
know you are touching the earth, and the stars hang high in the blue
vault above? This is more, indeed, than one has any right to expect
of life; it is a fairy tale from another world, from a life to come.

"And then to return home to one's cozy study-cabin, kindle the stove,
light the lamp, fill a pipe, stretch one's self on the sofa, and send
dreams out into the world with the curling clouds of smoke--is that a
dire infliction? Thus I catch myself sitting staring at the fire for
hours together, dreaming myself away--a useful way of employing the
time. But at least it makes it slip unnoticed by, until the dreams
are swept away in an ice-blast of reality, and I sit here in the
midst of desolation, and nervously set to work again.

"Wednesday, November 14th. How marvellous are these snow-shoe runs
through this silent nature! The ice-fields stretch all around, bathed
in the silver moonlight; here and there dark cold shadows project from
the hummocks, whose sides faintly reflect the twilight. Far, far out
a dark line marks the horizon, formed by the packed-up ice, over it
a shimmer of silvery vapor, and above all the boundless deep-blue,
starry sky, where the full moon sails through the ether. But in the
south is a faint glimmer of day low down of a dark, glowing red hue,
and higher up a clear yellow and pale-green arch, that loses itself
in the blue above. The whole melts into a pure harmony, one and
indescribable. At times one longs to be able to translate such scenes
into music. What mighty chords one w