ich the choicest of his jailers' gifts could not excite. The
only moments when his homesick heart could even pretend to forget its
longing for the desolate spaces, the lifeless rock ridges, the little,
snow-rimmed flower valleys, and the call of the eternal ice, were when,
in the solitary lilac-gray of dawn, he wallowed unobserved in his
sweetly chilly pool, and dreamed that the barking of the seals from
their tank across the garden was the authentic voice of his lost home.
But the coming of the first drowsy attendants would shatter this
illusion, and send him back under his rock to stand sullenly swaying and
swinging his head all day.

In this way the summer dragged along, and then the fine, dry fall; and
instead of becoming reconciled the young bear grew more moody. His
appetite began to fail and his fine coat lose its live, elastic quality.
The keepers were disappointed in him. At first they had expected to win
him over easily, because of his apparent amenableness and that look of
intelligence in his eyes. But now they gave him up as an irreconcilable,
and set themselves to keep him from pining away.

When winter came with raw rains, and sleet, and some sharp frosts, the
exile sniffed the air hopefully for a few days, then relapsed into a
deeper gloom. Then came a flurry of snow. As the great flakes fell about
him he grew wild with excitement, running with uplift head about his
cage, plunging in and out of the pool, and rearing himself against the
bars in a sort of play. While the flurry lasted he saw no one, and
forgot to eat. But in a day this tender snow had vanished, and he found
no sufficient consolation in the thin ice which came afterward to
encrust the edges of his pool. He seemed to feel himself cheated in his
dearest hopes, and grew more obstinately dejected than ever; till
finally came days when nothing would persuade him from the deepest
corner of his den. Some of the attendants thought this meant no more
than the drowsiness which, in his own home, might precede the desire for
hibernation. But one, more understanding of the wild kindreds than the
rest, declared that it was the very disease of homesickness, and that
the exile was eating his own heart out for desire of his frozen north.

The city of the young bear's exile was not so far south but that
sometimes, once in a long while, it found itself in the track of a
wandering northern blizzard. One day, with terrific suddenness, on the
heels of a gusty t