om her soft blue eye for poor Jo's sake; and he caught her in his arms
right off, without stopping to think at all what he was doing, and he
kissed away the tear; and, as he did it, a much bigger one came tearing
out of his own great hazel eye, and hurried down into his shaggy beard
to hide, as if it were quite frightened at what it had been doing with
itself.

"Spoken like the little lady that you are, my dear," broke out the
Captain; "always thinking of the unfortunate. And you are very right, my
child. Poor blind Jo's darkness is much worse than ours ever was, up in
the Frozen Sea, upon the lonely island,--far worse indeed, poor man! for
you must know that the stars were shining brightly there upon us all the
time; and then the moon came every month; and when it came, it came for
good and all, and never set for several days; and then sometimes the
aurora borealis would flash across the heavens, and clear away the
darkness for a little while, as if it were a huge broom sweeping cobwebs
from the skies, and letting in the light of day beneath the stars. O,
what a splendid sight it was!"

"O, tell us all about it, Captain Hardy, won't you?" asked all the
children, with one voice.

"Of course, I will," replied the Captain, "only I can do no sort of
justice to that species of natural scenery, don't you see? That's a
touch beyond John Hardy's powers of description, as I can well assure
you."

The children all declared that they never could think anything beyond
John Hardy's powers, and they believed it too.

"Well, well! Now let me see, my dears, what I can do for you. First, you
know the scientific chaps, especially my friend the Doctor, down in
Boston, say that the aurora borealis is electricity broke loose, and
tearing through the air, from pole to pole, for some purpose of its own.
It can't be caught, nor bottled up, as Franklin bottled up the
lightning, nor analyzed;--in short, nothing can be done with it; and so
it goes tearing through the skies, as I have said before, from pole to
pole, just where it likes.

"Now this is what it is, so far as one can see. When you go away beyond
the Arctic Circle, you see great fiery streams start up from a fiery
arch that stretches right across the sky before you; and from this fiery
arch the fiery streams of light shoot up, and then fall back
again,--sometimes lasting for a little while, and waving in the sky, to
and fro, like a silken curtain of many colors fluttering in th