g."

I stepped to the window, and there, sure enough, piled up beneath it and
against the house, was a great bank of snow, which the summer's sun had
not yet dissolved; and as I saw this, and then looked beyond it over the
wretched little village, and the desolate waste of rocks on which it
stood, and then on up the craggy steeps to the great white-topped
mountains, I could but wonder what strange occurrence had sent this
luxury-loving man, with books only for companions, into such a howling
wilderness. Was it his own fancy? or was it some cruel necessity? In
truth, the surprise was so great that I found myself suddenly turning
from the scene outside to that within, not indeed without an impulse
that the whole thing might have vanished in the interval, as the palace
of Aladdin in the Arabian tale.

My host was watching me attentively, no doubt reading my thoughts, for
as I turned round he asked if I "liked the contrast." To be quite
candid, I was forced to own myself greatly wondering "that a den so well
fitted for the latitude of Paris should be stumbled upon away up here so
near the Pole."

"Hardly in keeping with 'the eternal fitness of things,' eh?"

"Precisely so."

"You think, then, because a fellow chooses to live in barbarous
Greenland, he must needs turn barbarian?"

"Not exactly that, but we are in the habit of associating the
appreciation of comfort and luxury with the desire for social
intercourse,--certainly not with banishment like this."

"Then you would be inclined to think there is something unnatural, in
short, mysterious, in my being here,--tastes, fancies, inclinations, and
all?"

"I confess it would so strike me, if I took the liberty to speculate
upon it."

"Very far from the truth, I do assure you. I am not obliged to be here
any more than you are. I came from pure choice, and am at liberty to
return when I please. In truth, I do go home with the ship to
Copenhagen, once in three or four years, and spend a winter there,
living the while in a den much like what you here see; but I am always
glad enough to get back again. The salary which I receive from the
government does not support me as I live, so you see _that_ is not a
motive. But I am perfectly independent, have capital health, lots of
adventure, hardship enough (for you must know that, if I do sleep under
a sky-blue canopy, I am esteemed one of the most hardy men in all
Greenland) to satisfy the most insatiate appetite and perver