June 22.--It is midnight and midwinter. Thirty-five long, dayless nights have passed. An equal number of dreary, cheerless days must elapse before we again see the glowing orb, the star of day. The sun has reached its greatest northern declination. We have thus passed the antarctic midnight. The winter solstice is to us the meridian day, the zenith of the night as much so as twelve o’clock is the meridian hour to those who dwell in the more favoured lands, in the temperate and tropical zones, where there is a regular day and night three hundred and sixty-five times in the yearly cycle. Yesterday was the darkest day of the night; a more dismal sky and a more depressing scene could not be imagined, but to-day the outlook is a little brighter. The sky is lined with a few touches of orange, the frozen sea of black snow is made more cheerful by the high lights, with a sort of dull phosphorescent glimmer of the projecting peaks of ice. The temperature has suddenly fallen to -27.5° C. at noon, and the wind is coming out of the south with an easy force which has sent all the floating humidity of the past few days down, leaving an air clear and sharp. There will be an eclipse of one of the satellites of Jupiter this afternoon, and from an observation of this phenomenon the industrious captain expects to regulate our chronometers. He hopes also to get a good observation to fix our position, for we are somewhat anxious to know just where we are in this unknown world during the important days of the midnight. June 24.--For the past three days we have had steady cold weather with a temperature from -15° to -28° C. (-18.4° F.), and every night we have also had a brilliant aurora in the usual position, at about the usual hour. Auroras have been conspicuously absent from our skies for nearly two months. There was a feeble display on May twenty-ninth, and possibly a few faint exhibits have evaded our notice, but since the end of April there has been no auroral phenomenon which has attracted general interest. With this clear weather there is a noticeable brightness at noon. To-day the northern sky has a tinge of orange-red, limited by a band of green with a bit of the moon over it. Overhead we can see the Cross and other stars of the same magnitude. Our position, as calculated yesterday, is now far east, latitude 70° 47′ 45″, longitude 83° 43′ 45″. A sounding at this point would be interesting. For this purpose we have tried to cut a new hole through the ice. The old opening was closed by the disturbance and pressure of a fortnight ago, and since we have not been able to make another, but to-day we are desperately at work, chopping and cutting ice for a fishing and sounding hole. Having found that the canvas suits are entirely inadequate to retain the bodily heat, we are also trying to devise some more effective clothing. [Illustration: Nansen, the Mascot. _Drawn by Koren, the Cabin Boy._]