“If white bears are coming our way,” said Joe, “we’ll try and fix things so they’ll stop with us. We must make a little shelter on the deck aft, and set a whale-oil lamp burning in it with a kettle of salmon stewing over it. Then we’ll fix things so that if his bearness approaches it, he’ll breast a string and set off a rifle. One of those old Springfield muzzle-loaders that dad couldn’t sell, even to the mersinkers, will be just the thing. We can load it half full of bullets, and it don’t matter if it does burst. There’s plenty more of them.” “Good idea,” said Harry. “If bears are coming, I’d like to have something stop them before they get far enough aboard to scare me the way the last one did. We’ll do it to-day.” They did, but that night one of the terrible Arctic blizzards set in, and it never let up for a month. Their trap was rigged, but they could do nothing toward baiting it in such tremendous weather; they scarcely ventured outdoors, and got along as best they could by the galley fire. Yet the time did not hang very heavily on their hands. They read and studied, played all the games there were aboard the vessel, and slept a great deal. In the gloom and cold of the full Arctic night the tendency to hibernate seems to come on men as well as animals, and they sometimes slept the round of the clock at a stretch. The fifteenth of November the gale ceased as suddenly as it had come up, and they ventured out at high noon. The air was still, but intensely cold. Clad in reindeer-skin suits from head to toe, with fur hoods, and little but the eyes exposed to the frost, they looked about. A luminous twilight hung over all the wastes of snow. To the north the sky was purple black, flushing pink in quivering streams of light toward the zenith, where glowed great stars. The heavens seemed, through this luminous pink haze, these quivering bars of aurora, to have wonderful depth and perspective. Great golden stars shone there, some far, some seemingly very near, and the distance between the two was very marked. The wonderful depths of infinite space were revealed to them as never before, and they gazed in awe and delight. “I never knew before,” cried Harry, “what was meant by the depths of the heavens. At home the sky is a flat surface with holes poked in it that are stars. Here you see them worlds, with millions of miles of space before and behind and around them. It is wonderful. See the south, too; it is afire!” A little to the east of due south lambent flames sprang above the horizon as if a great fire burned there. They shot up and moved westward as though a great forest was going down before a smokeless conflagration. On to the west they moved, and sank, glowed, and disappeared—burnt out. It was the last of the midday sun, and they were not to see it again until well into February. A faint breeze seemed to blow in from the south, as if bearing a message and a promise that the sun would come again. Joe sniffed this breeze.