“Spoken like the little lady that you are, my dear,” broke out the Captain; “always thinking of the unfortunate. And you are very right, my child. Poor blind Jo’s darkness is much worse than ours ever was, up in the Frozen Sea, upon the lonely island,—far worse indeed, poor man! for you must know that the stars were shining brightly there upon us all the time; and then the moon came every month; and when it came, it came for good and all, and never set for several days; and then sometimes the aurora borealis would flash across the heavens, and clear away the darkness for a little while, as if it were a huge broom sweeping cobwebs from the skies, and letting in the light of day beneath the stars. O, what a splendid sight it was!”
“O, tell us all about it, Captain Hardy, won’t you?” asked all the children, with one voice.
“Of course, I will,” replied the Captain, “only I can do no sort of justice to that species of natural scenery, don’t you see? That’s a touch beyond John Hardy’s powers of description, as I can well assure you.”
The children all declared that they never could think anything beyond John Hardy’s powers, and they believed it too.
“Well, well! Now let me see, my dears, what I can do for you. First, you know the scientific chaps, especially my friend the Doctor, down in Boston, say that the aurora borealis is electricity broke loose, and tearing through the air, from pole to pole, for some purpose of its own. It can’t be caught, nor bottled up, as Franklin bottled up the lightning, nor analyzed;—in short, nothing can be done with it; and so it goes tearing through the skies, as I have said before, from pole to pole, just where it likes.
“Now this is what it is, so far as one can see. When you go away beyond the Arctic Circle, you see great fiery streams start up from a fiery arch that stretches right across the sky before you; and from this fiery arch the fiery streams of light shoot up, and then fall back again,—sometimes lasting for a little while, and waving in the sky, to and fro, like a silken curtain of many colors fluttering in the wind; and then again seeming to be phantom things playing hide-and-seek among the stars; sometimes like wicked spirits of the night, bent on mischief; sometimes like tongues of flame from some great fire in some great world beyond the earth, making one almost afraid that the heavens will break out presently in a roaring blaze, and rain a shower of living coals and ashes on his head.
“And O, how grand the colors are sometimes! The great arch of light that spans the sky is often bright with all the colors of the rainbow,—changing every instant. And from these flickering belts of light the fiery streams fly up with lightning speed,—green, and orange, and blue, and purple, and bright crimson,—all mingling here and there and everywhere above, while down beneath comes out in bold relief before the eye the broad, white plain of ice and snow upon the ocean, the great icebergs that lie here and there upon it, the tall white mountains of the land, and the dark islands in the sea; and then the flood of light dies away, and the dark islands in the sea, and the tall white mountains, and the icebergs, and the white plain around, all vanish from the sight, and the mind retains only an impression that the icebergs, with all these bright hues reflected on them from above, had come from space and darkness, like the meteors, then to vanish, and leave the darkness more profound.
“And thus the auroral light and color keep pulsating in the air, up and down, up and down; and thus the icebergs seem to come and go; and the very stars above seem to be rushing out with a bold bright glare, and going back again as quickly, singed and withered, as it were, into puny sparks, and, utterly disheartened with the effort to keep their places in the face of such a flood of brightness, are at length resolved no more to try to twinkle, twinkle through the night.
“And that is all I can tell you about the aurora borealis, for that is all I know about it.”
“O, isn’t he a great one?” whispered William to Fred, who sat close beside him on the locker,—“isn’t he, indeed?—to say he can’t describe an aurora borealis, when he has blood, thunder, fire, and all creation on his tongue.”