In course of time the long and dreary winter passed away, and signs of the coming spring began to manifest themselves to the dwellers in the Polar lands.

 

Chief and most musical among these signs were the almost forgotten sounds of dropping water, and tinkling rills. One day in April the thermometer suddenly rose to eighteen above the freezing-point of Fahrenheit. Captain Vane came from the observatory, his face blazing with excitement and oily with heat, to announce the fact.

 

“That accounts for it feeling so like summer,” said Benjy.

 

“Summer, boy, it’s like India,” returned the Captain, puffing and fanning himself with his cap. “We’ll begin this very day to make arrangements for returning home.”

 

It was on the evening of that day that they heard the first droppings of the melting snow. Long before that, however, the sun had come back to gladden the Polar regions, and break up the reign of ancient night. His departure in autumn had been so gradual, that it was difficult to say when night began to overcome the day. So, in like manner, his return was gradual. It was not until Captain Vane observed stars of the sixth magnitude shining out at noon in November, that he had admitted the total absence of day; and when spring returned, it was not until he could read the smallest print at midnight in June that he admitted there was “no night there.”

 

But neither the continual day of summer, nor the perpetual night of winter, made so deep an impression on our explorers as the gushing advent of spring. That season did not come gradually back like the light, but rushed upon them suddenly with a warm embrace, like an enthusiastic friend after a long absence. It plunged, as it were, upon the region, and overwhelmed it. Gushing waters thrilled the ears with the sweetness of an old familiar song. Exhalations from the moistened earth, and, soon after, the scent of awakening vegetation, filled the nostrils with delicious fragrance. In May, the willow-stems were green and fresh with flowing sap. Flowers began to bud modestly, as if half afraid of having come too soon. But there was no cause to fear that. The glorious sun was strong in his might, and, like his Maker, warmed the northern world into exuberant life. Mosses, poppies, saxifrages, cochlearia, and other hardy plants began to sprout, and migratory birds innumerable—screaming terns, cackling duck, piping plover, auks in dense clouds with loudly whirring wings, trumpeting geese, eider-ducks, burgomasters, etcetera, began to return with all the noisy bustle and joyous excitement of a family on its annual visit to much-loved summer quarters.

 

But here we must note a difference between the experience of our explorers and that of all others. These myriads of happy creatures—and many others that we have not space to name—did not pass from the south onward to a still remoter north, but came up from all round the horizon,—up all the meridians of longitude, as on so many railway lines converging at the Pole, and settling down for a prolonged residence in garrulous felicity among the swamps and hills and vales of Flatland.

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