In all my former experience in this region of startling novelties I had never seen any thing to equal what I witnessed that night. The air was warm almost as a summer's night at home, and yet there were the icebergs and the bleak mountains, with which the fancy, in this land of green hills and waving forests, can associate nothing but cold repulsiveness. The sky was bright and soft and strangely inspiring as the skies of Italy. The bergs had wholly lost their chilly aspect, and, glittering in the blaze of the brilliant heavens, seemed, in the distance, like masses of burnished metal or solid flame. Nearer at hand they were huge blocks of Parian marble, inlaid with mammoth gems of pearl and opal. One in particular exhibited the perfection of the grand. Its form was not unlike that of the Coliseum, and it lay so far away that half its height was buried beneath the line of blood-red waters. The sun, slowly rolling along the horizon, passed behind it, and it seemed as if the old Roman ruin had suddenly taken fire. Nothing indeed but the pencil of the artist could depict the wonderful richness of this sparkling fragment of Nature. Church, in his great picture of "The Icebergs," has grandly exhibited a scene not unlike that which I would in vain describe. In the shadows of the bergs the water was a rich green, and nothing could be more soft and tender than the gradations of color made by the sea shoaling on the sloping tongue of a berg close beside us. The tint increased in intensity where the ice overhung the water, and a deep cavern near by exhibited the solid color of the malachite mingled with the transparency of the emerald; while, in strange contrast, a broad streak of cobalt blue ran diagonally through its body. The bewitching character of the scene was heightened by a thousand little cascades which leaped into the sea from these floating masses,--the water being discharged from lakes of melted snow and ice which reposed in quietude far up in the valleys separating the high icy hills of their upper surface. From other bergs large pieces were now and then detached,--plunging down into the water with deafening noise, while the slow moving swell of the ocean resounded through their broken archways. I had been watching this scene for hours, lost in reverie and forgetfulness, when I was brought suddenly to my senses by the master's mate, who came to report, "Ice close aboard, sir." We were drifting slowly upon a berg about the height of our topmasts. The boats were quickly lowered to pull us off, and, the schooner once more in safety, I went to bed. I awoke after a few hours, shivering with the cold. The "bull's-eye" above my head was open, and a chilly fog was pouring in upon me. Hurrying on deck, I found the whole scene changed. A dense gray mist had settled over the waters and icebergs and mountains, blending them all in chaotic gloom.