Men, too, of the same fashion as themselves they met with on
shores far apart, but strange were these of aspect and speech and
manner of life. With them they tarried as long as they might, gaining
some knowledge of their tongue, and revealing to them the true God and
the Lord crucified.

In the latter time of their sea-faring they were blown far over the
northern side of the great sea, in such wise that the pilot star burned
well-nigh overhead in the heavens. Here they descried tall islands of
glittering rock, white and blue, crowned with minsters and castles and
abbeys of glass, but they heard no sound of bells or of men's voices or
of the stir of life.

Once as they were swept along in near peril of wreck, through flying
sea-smoke and plagues of hail, they heard a strange unearthly music
rising and falling in the blast. Some said it was Angels sent to
strengthen them; others said it was wild birds which they had seen
flying past in flocks; but Serapion said, "If it be Angels, blessed be
God; if it be birds, yet even they are God's Angels, lessoning us how
we shall praise Him, and sing Him a new song from the ends of the
earth." Then he raised his voice, singing the psalm

_Laudate Dominum de caelis,_
_Praise ye the Lord from the heavens: praise Him in the heights,_

and the Sea-farers sang it with earnest voices and with hearts lifted
up, and they were greatly encouraged.

It was in these latitudes stormy and cold that, to their thinking, the
Sea-farers won nearest to the Earthly Paradise. For, far in the sides
of the north as, in the red sunlight, they coasted a lofty land white
with snow-fields and blue with glacier ice, they entered a winding
fjord, and found themselves in glassy water slumbering between green
slopes of summer.

Down to the water's edge the shores were wooded with copses of dwarf
birch and willow, and the slopes were radiant with wild
flowers--harebell and yellow crowfoot, purple heath and pink azalea and
starry saxifrage. A rosy light tinged the snow on the wintry heights;
and over the edge of a cliff, far up the fjord, a glacier hung, and
from beneath the ice a jet of water burst forth and fell foaming down
the precipice to the shore. When they landed they found the ground
covered thick with berries dark and luscious, and while they gathered
these, a black and white snow-bunting flitted about them on its long
wings.

A miraculous thing was this garden of summer in th