“The Lord be praised for all His mercies!” he said. Ferratoni was down with his face among the leaves and blossoms. Gale said: “I’ve been to violet receptions before, but this rather lays it over anything, so far.” As for me, I was silent. I hardly knew what I had expected to see. Perhaps trees—perhaps a distant city—perhaps a waste of barren downs. But certainly not this. I knew, of course, that flowers bloomed at the very edge of Alaskan glaciers, but perhaps I had forgotten. Like Ferratoni, I got down to feel and smell them. They had a sweet, delicate odor, that had been borne from us by the wind. The blossom itself was somewhat different in form from our northern violets, and was of a darker hue. The leaf was smaller. Through a sea of bloom we pushed our boat toward the river above the rapids. The banks were lower, here, and there was no more ice. We were presently sailing between violet-scented shores, and the silence and balm that was in the air brought forgetfulness of our difficulties. To the ship we attempted to convey the great news, but now our telephone failed us almost entirely, and in spite of all that Ferratoni could do to it, it was with the greatest difficulty that we finally conveyed the bare facts, sacrificing altogether the poetic details of the scene about us. My first attempt to explain to Edith that we were met with violets was understood by her to be “violence,” and this was not easy to get rid of. However, she comprehended at last, and had she been standing on top of the ice-barrier, I think she could have heard me, without the telephone. As for her voice, it was lost utterly in the wide space between, and only the searching quality of Captain Biffer’s tones could convey to us her replies. Even these were lost when we tried again, a little later. Being thus cut off from the ship saddened us, in spite of our pleasant surroundings. “We’ll have to go it alone,” commented Gale. “Mebbe we’ll hit another set of vibrations up here, somewhere, and be all right again. We’re likely to strike most anything now. Anyway Johnnie knows we were doing well at last accounts. Do you know,” he added, some minutes later, “this would be a great place to lay out an addition. Violet Mead—how’s that for a name? Acre property, no grading, and if there was any way of getting over that ice-wall, it would be the easiest thing in the world to run a gravity railroad down the snowbank from Bottle Bay right to this meadow. There’s a steady incline and the drifts would be easy to cut through.” “How about the melting underneath in the summer, and the drifting overhead in the winter?” I asked. “I think a line of balloons would be more practical.” Gale shook his head. “No more balloons in mine. The going is well enough, but it’s the free and easy way you have of starting and stopping that I object to.”