raw blubber. For our purpose it will suffice to transport yourself into
the Arctic regions, and invest yourself with the average intelligence of
an ordinary human being who has not been debased by the artificial evils
that surround modern civilisation, or demoralised by strong drink. In
this condition of happy simplicity you draw near to the end of an Arctic
winter.

During eight months or so you have been more or less shrivelled-up,
petrified, mummified, by frost of the most intense and well-nigh
intolerable description. Your whole body has frequently been pierced by
winds, the constituents of which seemed to be needles and fire. Shelter
has been one of your chief subjects of meditation every day--ofttimes
all day; unwillingness to quit that shelter and eagerness to return to
it being your dominant characteristic. Darkness palpable has been
around you for many weeks, followed by a twilight of gloom so prolonged
that you _feel_ as if light were a long-past memory. Your eyes have
become so accustomed to ice and snow that white, or rather whitey-grey,
has long since usurped and exclusively held the place of colour in your
imagination, so that even black--a black cliff or a black rock cropping
up out of the snow--becomes a mitigated joy. Your ears have been so
attuned to the howling blast with interludes of dead calm and variations
of rending icebergs and bellowing walrus accompaniments, that melodious
harmonies have fled affrighted from your brain. As for your
nose--_esprit de marrow fat_, extract of singed hide, essence of
lamp-smoke, _eau de cuisine_, and de-oxygenised atmosphere of snow-hut,
have often inclined you to dash into the open air, regardless of frost
and snow, for purposes of revivification. Imagine all these things
intensified to the uttermost, and prolonged to nigh the limits of
endurance, so that genial ideas and softening influences seem to have
become things of the long-forgotten past, and _then_ try to imagine a
change, compared to which all the transformation scenes of all the
pantomimes that ever blazed are as a tomtit's chirp to a lion's roar, or
a--a--Words fail again! No matter.

But don't give in yet. Try, now, to imagine this sudden transformation
wrought, perhaps, in a few days to the slow music of southern zephyrs,
bearing on their wings light, and heat, and sunshine. Your ear is
surprised--absolutely startled--by the sound of trickling water. Old
memories that you thought were d