Nowhere is it more true that “the low sun makes the colour” than in the Arctic regions. The ice and snow, that are wearily white in midsummer, glow with all sorts of opaline tints in the sunrise light of March. The sketch is from amongst the floebergs to seaward of the ship. The sides of the berg in the centre have been worn into columns and alcoves by the surface floods of some former summer; but it has since been forced higher on the beach, and into shallower water. Snow-drifts fill up all the gorges and ravines amongst the bergs, and are in some places so hardened by wind and infiltration of sea-water, that tidal motion cracks and fissures them, especially round the grounded bergs.] If any part of Arctic life deserves the sentiment and romance that have been lavished on it, it is returning daylight. However practical and matter-of-fact a man may be, a long spell of Egyptian darkness will make him glad to see daylight again, and he may well be excused a little unnecessary emotion at the dawn of the pale young year. With us the day and the year were all but the same. When daylight was once established there was no more real night, though the sun made thirty-seven more and more shallow dips below the horizon before rising spirally through the heavens in perpetual day. Winter was our night, and the morning and the evening were spring and autumn. As February advanced, we began to have light enough to walk about on shore. Up to this time we had laboured under two disadvantages that had not oppressed our predecessors—namely, the extra noon darkness and the softness of the snow. Both together rendered it utterly impossible to indulge in exercise except along the well-trodden half-mile, with empty meat tins for guide posts, or backwards and forwards to the shore along the track of the sledges carrying stores to and from “Markham Hall.” It was not till we were able to walk about a little at noon that we got impatient of the darkness, and began to realise its length and intensity. The transition from darkness to daylight was like recovery from a long and somewhat delirious illness. As the light increased, the sky displayed all the colours of the rainbow, from rosy red at the horizon to cold violet overhead, and the ice, borrowing the spectrum sky tints, assumed hues of indescribable delicacy and beauty. A few hundred yards ahead of the ship some acres of floe had stranded and split into bergs with narrow lanes between them. The cliff-like walls afforded convenient sections of the ice, where its varying saltness and its strange lines of “air dust” could be favourably examined. Accordingly, these narrow clefts were well explored, and in them especially the low light produced most magical changes of opaline colour. Such effects are unsketchable. Form there was none, but while the low light lasted the tints of the ice vista were incredible—a brilliant transformation scene would look commonplace and natural beside them.