a weird noise, with signs which we took to be the animal’s manner of inviting its new acquaintance to a journey under the icy surface, where they might talk over the matter out of the cold blast of the wind, in the blue depths below. March 15.--The weather is remarkably clear. There is no wind, no noise, and no motion in the ice. During the night we saw the first aurora australis. I saw it first at eight o’clock, but it was so faint then that I could not be positively certain whether it was a cloud with an unusual ice-blink upon it or an aurora; but at ten o’clock we all saw it in a manner which was unmistakable. The first phenomenon was like a series of wavy fragments of cirrus clouds, blown by strong, high winds across the zenith. This entirely disappeared a few minutes after eight o’clock. What we saw later was a trembling lacework, draped like a curtain, on the southern sky. Various parts were now dark, and now light, as if a stream of electric sparks illuminated the fabric. The curtain seemed to move in response to these waves of light, as if driven by the wind which shook out old folds and created new ones, all of which made the scene one of new interest and rare glory. That I might better see the new attraction and also experiment with my sleeping-bag, I resolved to try a sleep outside upon one of the floes. For several days I had promised myself the pleasure of this experience, but for one reason or another I had deferred it. At midnight I took my bag and, leaving the warmth and comfort of the cabin, I struggled out over the icy walls of the bark’s embankment, and upon a floe three hundred yards east I spread out the bag. The temperature of the cabin was the ordinary temperature of a comfortable room; the temperature of the outside air was -20° C. (-4° F.) After undressing quickly, as one is apt to do in such temperatures, I slid into the fur bag and rolled over the ice until I found a depression suitable to my ideas of comfort. At first my teeth chattered and every muscle of my body quivered, but in a few minutes this passed off and there came a reaction similar to that after a cold bath. With this warm glow I turned from side to side and peeped past the fringe of accumulating frost, around my blow-hole through the bag, at the cold glitter of the stars. As I lay there alone, away from the noise of the ship, the silence and the solitude were curiously oppressive. There was not a breath of air stirring the glassy atmosphere, and not a sound from the ice-decked sea or its life to indicate movement or commotion. Only a day ago this same ice was a mass of small detached floes, moving and grinding off edges with a complaining squeak. How different it was now! Every fragment was cemented together into one heterogeneous mass and carpeted by a hard, ivory-like sheet of snow. Every move which I made in my bag was followed by a crackling complaint from the snow crust.