It was November, and presently the wind, keen and cold, swept down, like the wind from the Arctic zone. Mad, pitiless, the boundless waters piled themselves in towering billows. They leaped and menaced. They broke over Silver Islet with a frightful roar and drenched it with their freezing spray. They danced about it in savage fury. They beat against it continually, and the howling gale, swift and strong, dashed the foam in blinding sheets. Already the long, fierce winter of the North was rapidly setting in. Great layers of ice formed and broke, and ground up and formed again, until December, still and frigid, locked us within the impenetrable barriers of a vast, frozen sea. To the east, to the west, to the south, an illimitable wilderness of snow, the mighty Superior for miles lay wrapped in a silence profound as the grave. To the north, shrouded in their eternal solitude, cold, white and spectral, the cliffs upon the long Canadian shore held up their stony battlement, sheeted in ice, as in a pall. Utterly devoid of warmth, the sunlight blazed with a brilliance indescribable through an atmosphere that, clearer than crystal, glittered as with the scintillations of feldspar. But the nights—the nights swinging in their long winter arc, were illuminated by a glory more gorgeous than the unreal splendor wrought in the loom of dreams. The stars, myriads upon myriads, studded the whole heaven with drops of intense light, and the planets, magnified through the vast laboratory of the air, showed great balls of molten silver against a vault of jet. Sometimes when the night was at its blackest, suddenly there shot up, flaming from the white battlements of the Canadian shore, a thousand lances. Like the parade of an army, like the marshalling of far-reaching cohorts, the mighty processions swept the semicircle of the sky. They rose and fell. They wavered like the spears of troops in battle. Then the vast battalions, closing together, ran up in a towering shaft to the zenith. A river of ice-cold fire, it divided the heaven. It overflowed and spread out in a sea of gorgeous color that receded, wave upon wave, until it burned, a deep blue flame upon the frozen crown of the Canadian cliffs. I have watched this aurora in its changeful mood a hundred times. I have watched the illimitable fields of snow beneath, while the reflected light played upon them in weird rays, far out to the remote horizon.