onday, on the Pacific Isles.

This was the midnight sun as I had dreamed it--as I had hoped to see it.

Within fifteen minutes after midnight, there was a perceptible increase
of altitude, and in less than half an hour the whole tone of the sky had
changed, the yellow brightening into orange, and the saffron melting
into the pale vermilion of dawn. Yet it was neither the colours, nor the
same character of light as we had had, half an hour _before_ midnight.
The difference was so slight as scarcely to be described; but it was the
difference between evening and morning. The faintest transfusion of one
prevailing tint into another had changed the whole expression of heaven
and earth, and so imperceptibly and miraculously that a new day was
already present to our consciousness. Our view of the wild cliffs of
Svaerholt, less than two hours before, belonged to yesterday, though we
had stood on deck, in full sunshine, during all the intervening time.
Had the sensation of a night slipped through our brains in the momentary
winking of the eyes? Or was the old routine of consciousness so firmly
stereotyped in our natures, that the view of a morning was sufficient
proof to them of the preexistence of a night? Let those explain the
phenomenon who can--but I found my physical senses utterly at war with
those mental perceptions wherewith they should harmonise. The eye saw
but one unending day; the mind notched the twenty-four hours on its
calendar, as before.

Before one o'clock we reached the entrance of the Kiollefjord, which in
the pre-diluvial times must have been a tremendous mountain gorge, like
that of Gondo, on the Italian side of the Simplon. Its mouth is about
half a mile in breadth, and its depth is not more than a mile and a
half. It is completely walled in with sheer precipices of bare rock,
from three to five hundred feet in height, except at the very head,
where they subside into a stony heap, upon which some infatuated mortals
have built two or three cabins. As we neared the southern headland, the
face of which was touched with the purest orange light, while its
yawning fissures lay in deep-blue gloom, a tall ruin, with shattered
turrets and crumbling spires, detached itself from the mass, and stood
alone at the foot of the precipice. This is the _Finnkirka_, or "Church
of the Lapps," well known to all the northern coasters. At first it
resembles a tall church with a massive square spire; but the two parts
separate