The year is thus in reality divided into one long day and one long night. While the night continues, the ground is covered with snow, and no vegetable life is to be seen, and the animals have much to do to support themselves on what fish they may chance to pick up on the sea shore, by preying on each other, or else by scraping away the snow to get at that scanty vegetation which exists underneath. The odd-looking Esquimaux and Greenlanders would indeed be very badly off, if it were not for the beautiful atmospheric phenomena which I am going to describe. [Illustration] There are seldom intervals of many hours which are not illuminated by these beautiful meteors, called Auroræ Boreales, or Northern Lights, occurring in a never-ending variety of form, colour, and intensity. They generally have a tendency to form an irregular arch, and one side of them is always much better defined than the other. The more ragged side sends out brilliant corruscations, shooting out into the sharpest angles. Sir John Ross describes one which was nearly the colour of the full moon, and of equal brightness, in the form of a well-defined arch extending quite across the heavens, and reminded him of what he conceived must be the effect of Saturn's ring seen by the inhabitants of that planet from its surface. It lasted for several hours, and at last broke up as it were into fragments of light, and disappeared. The distinctness of its form is much influenced by the wind, and when the air becomes agitated, showers of rays spread out in every direction with the quickness of lightning. Sir Edward Parry describes long bands of light extending with immense rapidity, but always appearing to form round a fixed point, something like a riband held in the hand and shaken with an undulatory motion. Little scraps of the brightest light dart about in the heavens, called by the sailors, "merry dancers." In stormy weather these wild little things assume all manner of fanciful shapes; sometimes they shoot like rockets across the firmament, then take a zigzag or waving direction, and frequently seem to become invisible, and shine out again a little further on. The Esquimaux say that these appearances are the spirits of their ancestors playing at ball with the head of a Walrus! You may perhaps laugh at this odd notion, and I will laugh with you, if you will learn a lesson from it. You see that men in various states of society, are always looking out for the appearance of spiritual beings, and therefore that this disposition is a part of their constitution which is given them by God: and although their fancies may form strange notions at times, yet the exercise of the faculty, in some way or other, is very important. Men had much better think that they see spirits in the Aurora Borealis, and that they hear them in the wind, than forget that there are such things as spirits, and that they have spirits within them, which will live when their bodies are turned into dust.