"Now the candles are being lighted on the Christmas-trees, the children are let in and dance round in joyous delight. I must have a Christmas party for children when I get home. This is the time of rejoicing, and there is feasting in every cottage at home. And we are keeping the festival in our little way. Johansen has turned his shirt and put the outside shirt next him; I have done the same, and then I have changed my drawers, and put on the others that I had wrung out in warm water. And I have washed myself, too, in a quarter of a cup of warm water, with the discarded drawers as sponge and towel. Now I feel quite another being; my clothes do not stick to my body as much as they did. Then for supper we had 'fiskegratin,' made of powdered fish and maize-meal, with train-oil to it instead of butter, both fried and boiled (one as dry as the other), and for dessert we had bread fried in train-oil. To-morrow morning we are going to have chocolate and bread." [64] "Wednesday, December 25th. We have got lovely Christmas weather, hardly any wind, and such bright, beautiful moonlight. It gives one quite a solemn feeling. It is the peace of thousands of years. In the afternoon the northern lights were exceptionally beautiful. When I came out at 6 o'clock there was a bright, pale-yellow bow in the southern sky. It remained for a long time almost unchanged, and then began to grow much brighter at the upper margin of the bow behind the mountain crests in the east. It smouldered for some time, and then all at once light darted out westward along the bow; streamers shot up all along it towards the zenith, and in an instant the whole of the southern sky from the arc to the zenith was aflame. It flickered and blazed, it whirled round like a whirlwind (moving with the sun), rays darted backward and forward, now red and reddish-violet, now yellow, green, and dazzling white; now the rays were red at the bottom and yellow and green farther up, and then again this order was inverted. Higher and higher it rose; now it came on the north side of the zenith too; for a moment there was a splendid corona, and then it all became one whirling mass of fire up there; it was like a whirlpool of fire in red, yellow, and green, and the eye was dazzled with looking at it. It then drew across to the northern sky, where it remained a long time, but not in such brilliancy. The arc from which it had sprung in the south was still visible, but soon disappeared. The movement of the rays was chiefly from west to east, but sometimes the reverse. It afterwards flared up brightly several times in the northern sky; I counted as many as six parallel bands at one time, but they did not attain to the brightness of the former ones.