tly.
In the distant lands outside the valley there were innumerable churches
and bells, and all of them were ringing at this moment, from village to
village the wave of sound traveled, from one village to another one
could hear the peal through the bare branches of the trees; but up to
the children there came not a sound, nothing was heard here, for nothing
was to be announced here. In the winding valleys, the lights of lanterns
gleamed along the mountain-slopes, and from many a farm came the sound
of the farm bell to rouse the hands. But far less could all this be seen
and heard up here. Only the stars gleamed and calmly twinkled and shone.

Even though Conrad kept before his mind the fate of the huntsman who was
frozen to death, and even though the children had almost emptied the
bottle of black coffee--which necessarily would bring on a corresponding
relaxation afterwards, they would not have been able to conquer their
desire for sleep, whose seductive sweetness outweighs all arguments
against it, had not nature itself in all its grandeur assisted them and
in its own depths awakened a force which was able to cope with sleep.

In the enormous stillness that reigned about them, a silence in which no
snow-crystal seemed to move, the children heard three times the bursting
of the ice. That which seems the most rigid of all things and yet is
most flexible and alive, the glacier, had produced these sounds. Thrice
they heard behind them a crash, terrific as if the earth were rent
asunder,--a sound that ramified through the ice in all directions and
seemed to penetrate all its veins. The children remained sitting
open-eyed and looked out upon the stars.

Their eyes also were kept busy. As the children sat there, a pale light
began to blossom forth on the sky before them among the stars and
extended a flat arc through them. It had a greenish tinge which
gradually worked downward. But the arc became ever brighter until the
stars paled in it. It sent a luminosity also into other regions of the
heavens which shed greenish beams softly and actively among the stars.
Then, sheaves of vari-colored light stood in burning radiance on the
height of the arc like the spikes of a crown. Mildly it flowed through
the neighboring regions of the heavens, it flashed and showered softly,
and in gentle vibrations extended through vast spaces. Whether now the
electric matter of the atmosphere had become so tense by the unexampled
fall of snow t