“Only Eskimos eat seal! No, no, lad! We all eats un an’ likes un. Old seal is a bit high flavored, but white coats I finds as sweet an’ fine as mutton or fowl.”
“What are white coats?”
“Never heard of white coats? Well! Well! You sure has some things to learn of the North. White coats is young seals—very young uns.”
“I never heard them called that.” Paul felt some resentment at the implication that he was not well informed.
The sun went down that night in a blaze of wondrous glory. No human artist would dare be so prodigal with his colors or resort to such marvelous blendings of shades as the Almighty Artist paints into His sunsets upon the sky of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. The sunset on this occasion was unusually gorgeous. Brilliant reds shaded up into opalescent purples, deep orange into lighter yellow, reaching to the very dome of heaven. The water reflected the red, and the North Star seemed steaming through a mighty heaving, throbbing sea of blood. It was as though the earth’s very heart had been laid bare.
For a long time it lasted. Paul and his friends stood enthralled. It made them breathe deeply. They felt that they were in the presence of some mighty power, that very near them was the Master Himself, He who guides the world in its eternal journey, and holds in their places the innumerable millions of stars and untold other worlds that reach out into infinite space.
“Isn’t this wonderful—wonderful!” exclaimed Paul, at the end of a period of breathless awe.
“I never saw anything to compare with it!” declared Ainsworth. “It’s beyond the dreams of my wildest imagination!”
“It’s nowhere but in the North that such sunsets are ever seen,” said Remington.