During the Winter, unused to the severe climate, I rarely left the house. So far as was possible, I held myself aloof from the people, the people, that, as I said, were only the rough families of miners. Ignorant and uneducated, painfully ignorant and uneducated I was myself, still I could not associate with such as these. I did not grow tired, but yet I was glad when the long, frozen months had passed by. As the late Spring opened, Winter even then did not yield its supremacy without a fierce contest, but in the contest—the savage storms from the north—the ice broke. The huge cakes, drifting about, slowly, gradually, wore themselves away, and the wind dropped its javelins of frost. Late it was in June before the last vestige was gone of the bitter cold that had held us in its frigid clasp for more than two-thirds of a year. Then there opened for me an unfailing source of enjoyment. I learned to row, and father allowed me to buy a small boat. It was almost the only favor I ever asked of him, and how much have I to be thankful for that he did not deny me! Though slight of figure, my muscles were strong, and after awhile, with constant practice, I could row twenty miles in a day without exhaustion, and every day now, and all the day, I spent my time upon the water. The Summer, beautiful to me beyond description, was like a perpetual Spring. In my little boat, alone, I explored the shore far and near. I rowed to the very ledges of those cliffs that I had watched all Winter long lifting themselves, like a huge, jagged spine, against the sky. A thousand, sometimes twelve hundred feet, they reached up, gray and naked, a sheer, barren wall of rock from the water. With the cold waves forever at their feet, gloomy, silent, they stood in their drear majesty, and the chilly fog wrapped them round with the folds of its clammy garb. Only in the most beautiful weather did this fog lift from about them its clinging skirts, and slowly the damp mists trailed themselves off in long white plumes of down. At such times, floating idly in my skiff, I felt oppressed by the vast burden of their dreadful silence. I believe there is no greater solitude than that which sometimes at noon, when sea and sky are unwrinkled by wave or cloud, sits upon this mighty shore of desolate, desert rock. Yet here, where this profound silence broods, upon these tawny bastions of stone, occasionally fierce thunder storms play, and the waters in wild tumult dash against their base with a noise like the roar of heavy artillery.