rcle, the climate
in summer is that of another Italy, and the landscape a living poem
fairer than the visions of Endymion.

There was one solitary watcher of the splendid spectacle. This was a man
of refined features and aristocratic appearance, who, reclining on a
large rug of skins which he had thrown down on the shore for that
purpose, was gazing at the pageant of the midnight sun and all its
stately surroundings, with an earnest and rapt expression in his clear
hazel eyes.

"Glorious! beyond all expectation, glorious!" he murmured half aloud, as
he consulted his watch and saw that the hands marked exactly twelve on
the dial. "I believe I'm having the best of it, after all. Even if those
fellows get the _Eulalie_ into good position they will see nothing finer
than this."

As he spoke he raised his field-glass and swept the horizon in search of
a vessel, his own pleasure yacht,--which had taken three of his friends,
at their special desire, to the opposite island of Seiland,--Seiland,
rising in weird majesty three thousand feet above the sea, and boasting
as its chief glory the great peak of Jedke, the most northern glacier in
all the wild Norwegian land. There was no sign of a returning sail, and
he resumed his study of the sumptuous sky, the colors of which were now
deepening and burning with increasing lustre, while an array of clouds
of the deepest purple hue, swept gorgeously together beneath the sun as
though to form his footstool.

"One might imagine that the trump of the Resurrection had sounded, and
that all this aerial pomp,--this strange silence,--was just the pause,
the supreme moment before the angels descended," he mused, with a
half-smile at his own fancy, for though something of a poet at heart, he
was much more of a cynic. He was too deeply imbued with modern
fashionable atheism to think seriously about angels or Resurrection
trumps, but there was a certain love of mysticism and romance in his
nature, which not even his Oxford experiences and the chilly dullness of
English materialism had been able to eradicate. And there was something
impressive in the sight of the majestic orb holding such imperial revel
at midnight,--something almost unearthly in the light and life of the
heavens, as compared with the referential and seemingly worshipping
silence of the earth,--that, for a few moments, awed him into a sense of
the spiritual and unseen. Mythical passages from the poets he loved came
into his me