It was November, and presently the wind, keen and cold, swept down, like the wind from the Arctic zone. Mad, pitiless, the boundless waters piled themselves in towering billows. They leaped and menaced. They broke over Silver Islet with a frightful roar and drenched it with their freezing spray. They danced about it in savage fury. They beat against it continually, and the howling gale, swift and strong, dashed the foam in blinding sheets. Already the long, fierce winter of the North was rapidly setting in.
Great layers of ice formed and broke, and ground up and formed again, until December, still and frigid, locked us within the impenetrable barriers of a vast, frozen sea. To the east, to the west, to the south, an illimitable wilderness of snow, the mighty Superior for miles lay wrapped in a silence profound as the grave. To the north, shrouded in their eternal solitude, cold, white and spectral, the cliffs upon the long Canadian shore held up their stony battlement, sheeted in ice, as in a pall. Utterly devoid of warmth, the sunlight blazed with a brilliance indescribable through an atmosphere that, clearer than crystal, glittered as with the scintillations of feldspar. But the nights—the nights swinging in their long winter arc, were illuminated by a glory more gorgeous than the unreal splendor wrought in the loom of dreams. The stars, myriads upon myriads, studded the whole heaven with drops of intense light, and the planets, magnified through the vast laboratory of the air, showed great balls of molten silver against a vault of jet. Sometimes when the night was at its blackest, suddenly there shot up, flaming from the white battlements of the Canadian shore, a thousand lances. Like the parade of an army, like the marshalling of far-reaching cohorts, the mighty processions swept the semicircle of the sky. They rose and fell. They wavered like the spears of troops in battle. Then the vast battalions, closing together, ran up in a towering shaft to the zenith. A river of ice-cold fire, it divided the heaven. It overflowed and spread out in a sea of gorgeous color that receded, wave upon wave, until it burned, a deep blue flame upon the frozen crown of the Canadian cliffs. I have watched this aurora in its changeful mood a hundred times. I have watched the illimitable fields of snow beneath, while the reflected light played upon them in weird rays, far out to the remote horizon.
During the Winter, unused to the severe climate, I rarely left the house. So far as was possible, I held myself aloof from the people, the people, that, as I said, were only the rough families of miners. Ignorant and uneducated, painfully ignorant and uneducated I was myself, still I could not associate with such as these. I did not grow tired, but yet I was glad when the long, frozen months had passed by. As the late Spring opened, Winter even then did not yield its supremacy without a fierce contest, but in the contest—the savage storms from the north—the ice broke. The huge cakes, drifting about, slowly, gradually, wore themselves away, and the wind dropped its javelins of frost.
Late it was in June before the last vestige was gone of the bitter cold that had held us in its frigid clasp for more than two-thirds of a year. Then there opened for me an unfailing source of enjoyment. I learned to row, and father allowed me to buy a small boat. It was almost the only favor I ever asked of him, and how much have I to be thankful for that he did not deny me! Though slight of figure, my muscles were strong, and after awhile, with constant practice, I could row twenty miles in a day without exhaustion, and every day now, and all the day, I spent my time upon the water.
The Summer, beautiful to me beyond description, was like a perpetual Spring. In my little boat, alone, I explored the shore far and near. I rowed to the very ledges of those cliffs that I had watched all Winter long lifting themselves, like a huge, jagged spine, against the sky. A thousand, sometimes twelve hundred feet, they reached up, gray and naked, a sheer, barren wall of rock from the water. With the cold waves forever at their feet, gloomy, silent, they stood in their drear majesty, and the chilly fog wrapped them round with the folds of its clammy garb. Only in the most beautiful weather did this fog lift from about them its clinging skirts, and slowly the damp mists trailed themselves off in long white plumes of down. At such times, floating idly in my skiff, I felt oppressed by the vast burden of their dreadful silence. I believe there is no greater solitude than that which sometimes at noon, when sea and sky are unwrinkled by wave or cloud, sits upon this mighty shore of desolate, desert rock. Yet here, where this profound silence broods, upon these tawny bastions of stone, occasionally fierce thunder storms play, and the waters in wild tumult dash against their base with a noise like the roar of heavy artillery.
So the weeks slipped by, and it was in the early part of October that first I saw a change had come over father. As I have said, he was by nature a reserved, unsociable, even morose man. He was never communicative, and to me sometimes spoke hardly two dozen words in a day. I had grown used to this, and felt that I had nothing to complain about, as he laid no restrictions upon me in any respect. But now I could not help noticing a decided alteration, both in his looks and manner. Constitutionally a thin man, his face appeared thinner to me than ever. So exceedingly pale and worn was he, that I do not know that I had ever seen a more haggard countenance. His eyes, which were very light in color and deep-set in his head, had an unnatural brightness, a strange expression I can hardly describe, a peculiar, watching wakefulness. His manner was restless and uneasy in the extreme, and he spoke even less frequently than usual. He staid out much later than had been his ordinary habit, often not coming home until early in the morning; and several times I heard him with a slow step walk back and forth, back and forth, over the floor of his room all night.
As I have said, I knew nothing of his duties, nor did I know any thing of the miners. When first I noticed the change upon father, I thought he was over fatigued perhaps, then I became alarmed lest he was ill. Little as he cared for me, he was the only human being on earth upon whom I had the slightest claim, and I would have done any thing for him. I could not bear to see him look so badly. He had never manifested any thing towards me but utter indifference, and so strangely reserved was he that I, in my great dread that he might be harsh some time, had hardly ever volunteered a single sentence to him. I was troubled, and did not know what to do. That night at supper I said, gently,—
“Father, do you feel well?”
At first he did not appear to hear, and I repeated my question, then he turned his pale eyes upon me suddenly with a quick, startled look in them that frightened me,—
“What?”