a passage down to the farm.  To Maurice, at least, this idea suggested itself with considerable vividness as, on the second day after his arrival, he had his first complete view of the glacier.  He had approached it, not from below, but from the western side, at the only point where ascent was possible.  The vast expanse of the ice lay in cold, ghastly shade; for the sun, which was barely felt as a remote presence in the upper air, had not yet reached the depths of the valley.  A silence as of death reigned everywhere; it floated up from the dim blue crevasses, it filled the air, it vibrated on the senses as with a vague endeavor to be heard.  Jake, carrying a barometer, a surveyor’s transit, and a multitude of smaller instruments, followed cautiously in his master’s footsteps, and a young lad, Tharald Ormgrass’s son, who had been engaged as a guide, ran nimbly over the glazed surface, at every step thrusting his steel-shod heels vindictively into the ice.  But it would be futile for one of the uninitiated to attempt to follow Maurice in his scientific investigations; on such occasions he would have been extremely uninteresting to outside humanity, simply because outside humanity was the last thing he would have thought worth troubling himself about.  And still his unremitting zeal in the pursuit of his aim, and his cool self-possession in the presence of danger, were not without a sublimity of their own; and the lustrous intensity of his vision as he grasped some new fact corroborative of some favorite theory, might well have stirred a sympathetic interest even in a mind of unscientific proclivities.

An hour after noon the three wanderers returned from their wintry excursion, Maurice calm and radiant, the ebony-faced Jake sore-footed and morose, and young Gudmund, the guide, with that stanch neutrality of countenance which with boys passes for dignity.  The sun was now well in sight, and the silence of the glacier was broken.  A thousand tiny rills, now gathering into miniature cataracts, now again scattering through a net-work of small, bluish channels, mingled their melodious voices into a hushed symphony, suggestive of fairy bells and elf-maidens dancing in the cool dusk of the arctic midsummer night.

Fern, with an air of profound preoccupation, seated himself on a ledge of rock at the border of the ice, took out his note-book and began to write.

“Jake,” he said, without looking up, “be good enough to get us some dinner.”

“We have nothing except some bread and butter, and some meat extract,” answered the servant, demurely.

“That will be quite sufficient.  You will find my pocket-stove and a bottle of alcohol in my valise.”

Jake grumblingly obeyed; he only approved of science in so far as it was reconcilable with substantial feeding.  He placed the lamp upon a huge bowlder (whose black sides were here and there enlivened with patches of buff and scarlet lichen), filled the basin with water from the glacier, and then lighted the wick.  There was something obtrusively incongruous in seeing this fragile contrivance, indicating so many complicated wants, placed here among all the wild strength of primitive nature; it was like beholding the glacial age confronted with the nineteenth century.