"Boh!" exclaimed Amalatok, rising impatiently. "I will not listen to
the nonsense of Blackbeard. Have I not heard him say that the world
stands on nothing, spins on nothing, and rolls continually round the
sun? How can anything spin on nothing? And as to the sun, use your own
eyes. Do you not see that for a long time it rolls round the world, for
a long time it rolls in a circle above us, and for a long time it rolls
away altogether, leaving us all in darkness? My son, these Kablunets
are ignorant fools, and you are not much better for believing them.
Boo! I have no patience with the nonsense talk of Blackbeard."

The old chief flung angrily out of the hut, leaving his more philosophic
son to continue the discussion of the earth's mysteries with Makitok,
the reputed wizard of the furthest possible north.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note. The writer has often waded knee-deep in such boots, for hours at
a time, on the swampy shores of Hudson's Bay, without wetting his feet
in the slightest degree.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT.

TELLS, AMONG OTHER THINGS, OF A NOTABLE DISCOVERY.

Soon after this, signs of approaching winter began to make their
appearance in the regions of the North Pole. The sun, which at first
had been as a familiar friend night and day, had begun to absent himself
not only all night, but during a large portion of each day, giving sure
though quiet hints of his intention to forsake the region altogether,
and leave it to the six months' reign of night. Frost began to render
the nights bitterly cold. The birds, having brought forth and brought
up their young, were betaking themselves to more temperate regions,
leaving only such creatures as bears, seals, walruses, foxes, wolves,
and men, to enjoy, or endure, the regions of the frigid zone.

Suddenly there came a day in October when all the elemental fiends and
furies of the Arctic circle seemed to be let loose in wildest revelry.
It was a turning-point in the Arctic seasons.

By that time Captain Vane and his party had transported all their
belongings to Great Isle, where they had taken up their abode beside old
Makitok. They had, with that wizard's permission, built to themselves a
temporary stone hut, as Benjy Vane facetiously said, "on the very top of
the North Pole itself;" that is, on the little mound or truncated cone
of rock, in the centre of the Great Isle, on which they had already