sang lustily as we slid down the Tornea, finding its dreary,
sparsely-settled banks cheerful and smiling by contrast with the
frightful solitudes we had left. After some hours the postillion stopped
before a house on the Swedish bank to hay his horses. We went up and
found a single inhabitant, a man who was splitting fir for torches, but
the conversation was limited to alternate puffs from our pipes. There
was a fine aurora behind us--a low arch of white fire, with streamers
radiating outward, shifting and dancing along its curve.

It was nearly ten o'clock before we reached Kardis, half unconscious
from the cold. Our horse ran into the wrong place, and we lost sight of
the baggage-sled, our only guide in the darkness. We could no longer
trust the animal's instinct, but had to depend on our own, which is
perhaps truer: at least, I have often found in myself traces of that
blind, unreasoning faculty which guides the bee and the bird, and have
never been deceived in trusting to it. We found the inn, and carried a
cloud of frozen vapor into the kitchen with us, as we opened the door.
The graceful wreaths of ice-smoke rolled before our feet, as before
those of ascending saints in the old pictures, but ourselves, hair from
head to foot, except two pairs of eyes, which looked out through icy
loop-holes, resembled the reverse of saints. I told the landlord in
Finnish that we wanted to sleep--"_mia tarvi nuku a_." He pointed to a
bed in the corner, out of which rose a sick girl, of about seventeen,
very pale, and evidently suffering. They placed some benches near the
fire, removed the bedding, and disposed her as comfortably as the place
permitted. We got some hot milk and hard bread, threw some reindeer
skins on the vacant truck, and lay down, but not to sleep much. The room
was so close and warm, and the dozen persons in it so alternately
snoring and restless, that our rest was continually disturbed. We,
therefore, rose early and aroused the lazy natives.

The cold was still at 47 deg. below zero. The roads were so much better,
however, that we descended again to our own runners, and our lively
horses trotted rapidly down the Tornea. The signs of settlement and
comparative civilisation which now increased with every mile were really
cheering. Part of our way lay through the Swedish woods and over the
intervening morasses, where the firs were hung with weepers of
black-green moss, and stood solid and silent in their mantles of