had been licked up by weeks of screaming wind.  Just now the wind was still.  The sky was like black steel sown with diamonds, and the stars seemed to snap under the terrific cold.  Suddenly their bitter sparkle faded, and a delicate pale green glow spread itself, opening like a fan, till it covered half the heavens.  Almost immediately the center of the base of the fan rolled itself up till the strange light became an arch of intense radiance, the green tint shifting rapidly to blue-white, violet, gold, and cherry rose.  A moment more and the still arch broke up into an incalculable array of upright spears of light, pointing toward the zenith, and dancing swiftly from side to side with a thin, mysterious rustle.  They danced so for some minutes, ever changing color, till suddenly they all melted back into the fan-shaped glow.  And the glow remained, throbbing softly as if breathless, uncertain whether to die away or to go through the whole performance again.”

“I know—­” began the Child, but checked himself at once with a deprecating glance of apology.

“Except for the dancing wonder of the light,” continued Uncle Andy, graciously pretending not to hear the interruption, “nothing stirred in all that emptiness of naked space.  Of life there was not the least sign anywhere.  This appeared the very home of death and intolerable cold.  Yet at one spot, between two little, almost indistinguishable ridges of snow, might have been noticed a tiny wisp of vapor.  If one had put his face down close to the snow, so that the vapor came between his eyes and the light, he would have made it out quite distinctly.  And it would have certainly seemed very puzzling that anything like steam should be coming up out of that iron-bound expanse.”

Now the Child had once seen, in the depth of winter, a wreath of mist arising from the snowy rim of an open spring, and for the life of him he could not hold his tongue.

“It was a boiling spring,” he blurted out.

Uncle Andy gazed at him for some seconds in a disconcerting silence, till the Child felt himself no bigger than a minute.

“It was a bear,” he announced at length coldly.  Then he was silent again.

And the Child, mortified at having made such a bad guess, was silent too, in spite of his pangs of curiosity at this startling assertion.

“You see,” went on Uncle Andy, after he was satisfied that the Child was not going to interrupt again, at least for the moment, “you see, under those two ridges of frozen snow there was a little cavern-like crevice in the rock.  It was sheltered perfectly from those terrific winds which sometimes for days together would drive screaming over the levels.  And in this crevice, at the first heavy snowfall, a big white bear had curled herself up to sleep.