or one night's shelter; it
was early morning and deadly cold. The whole picture was sharp as a cut
crystal--the triple court-yard, the stone pavement, the gray well, and
frozen pile of firewood. He saw, recognized, lost it, and knew himself
to be skimming down the Nevskiy Prospekt and across the Winter Palace
Square, where the great angel towers upon its rose-granite monument.
Forward, forward he was carried, along the bank of the frozen Neva and
over the Troitskiy bridge, the powdered snow stinging his face like
pinpoints as it flew up from the nails in his little horse's shoes. Then
followed a magnifying of the picture--massed buildings rising from the
snow--buildings gold and turquoise-domed, that, even as they
materialized, lost splendor and merged into the unpretentious frontage
of the Finland station.

The scroll of the dream unwound; the dreamer moved, easing his position,
shaking back a lock of dark hair that had fallen across his forehead. He
was no longer rocking to the power of the north express; he was standing
on the platform at the end of a little train that puffed out of the
Finland station--a primitive, miniature train, white with frost and
powdered with the ashes of its wood fuel. The vision came and passed a
sketch, not a picture--a suggestion of straight tracks, wide snow
plains, and the blue, misty blur of fir woods. Then a shifting, a
juggling of effects! Abo, the Finnish port, painted itself upon his
imagination, and he was embarked upon the lonely sledge-drive, to the
harbor. He started in his sleep, shivered and sighed at that remembered
drive. The train passed over new points, the hoods of the lamps swayed,
the lights blinked and winked, and his mind swung onward in response to
the physical jar.

Abo was obliterated. He was on board a ship--a ship ploughing her way
through the ice-fields as she neared Stockholm; salt sea air flicked his
nostrils, he heard the broken ice tearing the keel like a million files,
he was sensible of the crucial sensation--the tremendous quiver--as the
vessel slipped from her bondage into the cradle of the sea, a sentient
thing welcoming her own element!

The heart of the dreamer leaped to that strange sensation. He drew a
long, sharp breath, and sat up, suddenly awake. It was over and done
with--the coldness, the rigor, the region of ice bonds! The fingers of
the future beckoned to him; the promises of the future lapped his ears
as the waves had lapped the ship's s