boat? He _would_ build a boat. He would set about it
directly.--Here was work for the rest of the winter!

His first step must be to go home and have his dinner; his next--to
consult George Macwha, who had been a ship-carpenter in his youth. He
would run over in the evening before George should have dropped work,
and commit the plan to his judgment.

In the evening, then, Alec reached the town, on his way to George
Macwha. It was a still lovely night, clear and frosty, with--yes, there
were--millions of stars overhead. Away in the north, the streamers were
shooting hither and thither, with marvellous evanescence and
re-generation. No dance of goblins could be more lawless in its
grotesqueness than this dance of the northern lights in their ethereal
beauty, shining, with a wild ghostly changefulness and feebleness, all
colours at once; now here, now there, like a row of slender
organ-pipes, rolling out and in and along the sky. Or they might have
been the chords of some gigantic stringed instrument, which chords
became visible only when mighty hands of music struck their keys and
set them vibrating; so that, as the hands swept up and down the Titanic
key-board, the chords themselves seemed to roll along the heavens,
though in truth some vanished here and others appeared yonder. Up and
down they darted, and away and back--and always in the direction he did
not expect them to take. He thought he heard them crackle, and he stood
still to listen; but he could not be sure that it was not the snow
sinking and _crisping_ beneath his feet. All around him was still as a
world too long frozen: in the heavens alone was there motion. There
this entrancing dance of colour and shape went on, wide beneath, and
tapering up to the zenith! Truly there was revelry in heaven! One might
have thought that a prodigal son had just got home, and that the music
and the dancing had begun, of which only the far-off rhythmic shine
could reach the human sense; for a dance in heaven might well show
itself in colour to the eyes of men.--Alec went on till the lights from
the windows of the town began to throw shadows across the snow. The
street was empty. From end to end nothing moved but an occasional
shadow. As he came near to Macwha's shop, he had to pass a row of
cottages which stood with their backs to a steep slope. Here too all
was silent as a frozen city. But when he was about opposite the middle
of the row, he heard a stifled laugh, and then a