The days grew shorter and shorter, winds moaned through the woods and brown leaves fell, and soon they sighed through leafless trees; then the birds of migration were found to have fled, even the buffaloes and the bisons went southwards after the sun, and the bears were no longer seen in the woods. But the building of the new hall went steadily on, and soon the roof was up and the flooring laid; and a fine strong structure it looked, though, as far as shape and architecture went, a stranger would have been puzzled to know what it was—whether church or market, mill or smithy. Never mind, there it was, and inside, at one end, there was a large fireplace built, big enough to accommodate a bull bison if he wanted roasting whole.
Ap was proud of his work, I can assure you, and after he had built a few forms for seats, he waxed still more ambitious, and commenced making chairs.
I am sorry to say a death occurred on board about this time: it was that of the yellowhammer, that had flown aboard after they had left Shetland. It was universally lamented, for though not much of a singer, it did what it could, and its little humble song could at any time recall to memory broomy braes and moorlands clad in golden-scented gorse.
The mornings were cold and sharp now, and in the long fore-nights the big lamp was lit in the snuggery, and a roaring fire in the stove was quite a treat.
On coming on deck one evening about sunset, this is what they saw on looking skywards. All around the horizon, for two spear-lengths high, was a slate-coloured haze; above this the mist was of a yellow hue, gradually merging into the blue of the open sky; and the sun was going down, looking like a great molten gong, his upper two-thirds a deep blood-red, the lower a lurid purple. The sea was waveless, yellow and glassy. A change was coming.
Chapter Nineteen.
Winter Comes Apace—New Visitors from the North—A “Perwision o’ Natur’”—A Mad but Merry Scene—The Downfall of Snow-Stars—An Adventure, but where will it End?
In the far north—up in the high latitudes, as sailors are wont to call them—winter often comes on with startling rapidity. Nobody unaccustomed to these regions would believe that there could be so short an interval between the beautiful Indian summer, and the stern and rigorous Arctic winter. A few bright and almost balmy windless days, perhaps, herald its approach—days when there is a deep-abiding silence on mountain, plain, and sea, and silence in the great forests themselves, where all nature seems to be breathless, expectant, waiting for something to happen, something to come. The softer-leaved trees, the willows and water-ashes, the planes and the mountain mahoganies, that erst clad the glens in a cloud-land of green, are now stripped and bare, and the few brown leaves that cling here and there on some of the branches, tremble in the uncertain air, just as if the trees were things of life and were nervous, and were whispering to each other and saying, “Oh! we all know what is coming; would that we could be up and be off like the beasts and the birds of the forest that have all fled south! But we cannot, and our branches will be rent, our limbs will be torn and severed by the stormy breath of swift-advancing winter!” But those giants of the woodlands and hilltops, the cedars and tamaracs, the spruces and pines, stood forth bold and stately as in summer. No nervousness about them, their roots were fixed in the rocks themselves, and their sturdy limbs, still clothed in black and green, could bid defiance to every blast that could blow.