When the dense wood of stupendous pines opened into long vistas, the whole northern quarter of the sky could be seen, illuminated from the horizon to the zenith. Gloriously bright as the most brilliant phosphorus, masses of fire arose in the form of columns that waved, towered, and shot into the air, with streaks of fainter light between. Anon they all blended and merged into each other with renewed grandeur, aslant, or radiating from a centre, like the sticks of a mighty fan. All that portion of the heavens seemed a mass of shining gold, rubies, and sapphires, with a wondrous light streaming over them, broadening, brightening, and deepening, then fading away, to flash forth again in greater beauty and glory, while, as if to enhance the magnificence of this illumination, many falling stars shot across it, leaving in their train sparkles of light, more brilliant even than the glory that blazed beyond. In black outline between, and in the immediate foreground, towered the dark and solemn pines, in solitude and silence. Not a sound was heard but the occasional snort of their horses, or the cry of a distant wolf. Balgonie was surmising whether Natalie would be surveying the beautiful natural illumination from her window, or from the terrace: he forgot that it was nothing new to her. Certainly it proved of little interest to Michail Podatchkine, who, under his thick beard, growled at the officer for loitering. The Scottish islesmen call the streamers of the Aurora "the merry dancers;" but the Siberians name them "the raging host:" and Balgonie was reflecting what a relief their brilliance must prove to the lonely hunters, who at that very time were pursuing the white bear and the blue fox, far beyond the Lena, and along the shores of the Icy Sea, when his attendant disturbed his reverie. "Well, Michail," said he, in reply to some remark in which the Corporal, who saw nothing wonderful in the matter, urged that they should proceed, "we have missed the sugar caravan, and cannot discover the residence of the duornin I spoke of, so I am rather provoked with you." "Oh, Excellency, who can withstand God or the Great Novgorod?" whined the fellow, using an old Russian proverb. Jean Paul Richter says, "the more weakness, the more lying; force goes straight, but any cannon-ball with cavities in it goes crooked." Some such thought as this occurred to Balgonie, as he checked his horse, and half turning round, with a stern expression in his face, which the light in the north made sufficiently plain, he said:-- "Rascal! I fear you are deceiving me again!"