It is difficult for us to believe that these snow houses are comfortable, but they are very warm indeed; or, rather, I should say they are the warmest houses that could be made for the very severe climate of Greenland. The Esquimaux is hardened to the cold, and can bear it much better than we can. He wraps himself up in his furs, and lays down on his icy couch, and sleeps as peacefully and comfortably as we do on our soft mattresses. It only required a few hours to build the winter house of Loonerkoo, and to put it into perfect order. A still shorter time sufficed for constructing his summer residence, which was nothing more than a large tent, made of dressed skins. The Arctic summer is short. It really lasts only about six weeks. For, after the worst of the wintry weather is over, it takes the sun a good while to melt the heavy masses of snow and ice, and to send them floating down the rivers and bays, and out into the ocean, where they finally disappear. This season is scarcely warm enough to call Spring; it is, more properly, the breaking up of Winter. It is a time when icebergs abound, and boating is a very dangerous amusement. But, after the ground is freed from its icy envelope, everything starts into life, and grows with the most astonishing rapidity. A plant will spring up, grow two or three feet high perhaps, bud, blossom, and bear fruit in the time our plants of the temperate zone will be producing a foot or so of stalk and leaves. In a few days after the fir trees have dropped the last of their snow-wreaths their branches will be covered with delicate spears of fresh green. A field that a week or two before was white with snow will be carpeted with flowers. The reason of this growth, which seems magical, is that in the Arctic zone, after the sun once gets well up above the horizon, it stays up—it does not set again for a long time, but shines steadily on, day and night. [Illustration: ICEBERGS AND GLACIERS.] I use the words day and night in the sense we generally use them to mark the division of time into twenty-four hours. In our latitude this division of time also marks the periods of light and darkness, but it is not so in the Arctic countries. There, you know, the day is six months long, and the night six months. But the Esquimaux have their regular times for sleeping, for, of course, they can’t stay awake six months, or sleep six months; but they naturally spend more time in sleep in their dreary winter than during their beautiful summer. It was on Polargno’s sixteenth birth-day that he had his adventure with the fox. It was mid-winter, and consequently midnight—that is the middle of the six months’ night—the seventh of January, I think, that his birth-day came around.