Spirit thermometers are expensive and so other means of taking the temperature have been devised. Pain-killer is known to freeze at forty-five and alcohol at seventy-five below zero. When the still cold comes on the pain-killer is put out. When it freezes, the alcohol replaces it. When the latter freezes we give it up with a feeling that it really does not matter how much colder than seventy-five below it is! We are familiar with the old legend to the effect that the abode of the Hyperboreans was in some distant region far beyond the North Wind! That it was a Paradise, the Elysian Fields, a land of perpetual sunshine and marvelous fertility, inaccessible by land or by sea! I have often had occasion to ponder upon this legend during my various journeyings in Alaska. Did you ever take a _daylight_ photograph by the _Midnight_ Sun? I have. Did you ever sun yourself, at midnight, at a picnic? Or try to sleep in a land where there is no such thing as night? Where there are twenty-four hours of sunshine, necessitating the curtaining of the windows in order to be able to keep one's eyes closed and to obtain for both eyes and nerves that real rest which comes only with the darkness? I have, many times. Nowhere else in all the world are there such wondrous tints as in Alaska. To appreciate the beauty of the land, however, one needs must be an early riser. To have seen the marvelous change which comes over the pure whiteness of the snow-crowned crests between the darkness and the dawn! The tender violet becomes topaz, the topaz deepens into gold. The gold merges into burnished copper, the copper into rose, the rose into crimson, and then--the day is born! No man can see the dawn break over the mountain tops, especially if it be in a lonely, sparsely-peopled land, without feeling as did the poet when he wrote: "For I know of a sun and a wind. And some plains and a mountain behind, Where there's neither a road nor a tree-- Only my Maker and me!" In Alaska, as elsewhere, we have a land of contrasts, it is true. In December there are but two and a half hours of daylight. At noon the sun throws long horizontal rays and on cloudy days the colors of the sunrise merge into those of the sunset! And there is ever the long twilight--no matter what time of the year it may be. On the shortest day there are slight traces of daylight from about nine until three o'clock.