ned for a period of many weary years. He was guilty of no crime,
his incarceration being the result of political intrigue. When he was
finally brought to the scaffold for execution, a messenger interrupted
the headsman at the last moment and announced a pardon from the king.
"The pardon," said the worn-out sufferer, "is severer than the penalty."

The usual route of those who seek to gain a view of the "midnight
sun"--that is, of witnessing the phenomenon of the sun passing round
the horizon without sinking beneath it--is to depart from Troendhjem by
sea, for the North Cape, skirting the ironbound coast for a distance of
about seven hundred miles.

As we sail northward, the rapid lengthening of the days becomes more and
more apparent. At Lund, in the extreme south of Sweden, the longest day
experienced is seventeen hours and a half; at Stockholm, two hundred
miles further north, the longest day of the year is eighteen hours and a
half; at Bergen, in Norway, three hundred miles north of Lund, the
longest day is twenty-one hours. Above this point of latitude to the
North Cape, there is virtually no night at all during the brief summer
season, as the sun is visible, or nearly so, for the whole twenty-four
hours. From early in May until about the first of August, north of
Troendhjem, the stars take a vacation, or at least they are not visible,
while the moon is so pale as to give no light. Even the Great Bear puts
by his seven lustres, and the diamond belt of Orion is unseen. But the
heavenly lamps revive by the first of September, and after a short
period are supplemented by the marvellous and beautiful radiations of
the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. Winter now sets in, the sun
disappears entirely from sight, and night reigns supreme, the heavens
shining only with a subdued light. Were it not for the brilliancy of the
Auroral light the fishermen could hardly pursue their winter business,
that being the harvest time with them, and midnight is considered to be
the best period of the twenty-four hours for successful fishing in these
regions. In and about Lofoden Islands alone, five thousand boats are
thus regularly employed, giving occupation to twenty thousand men in the
boats and a couple of thousand on the shore.

The coast of Norway is bordered by innumerable rocky islands, and also
by deep fjords, winding inland from ten to fifty miles each, among
masses of rock forming perpendicular walls often towering a thousa