Even in the good north country, where the white breath of the melting icebergs takes turn and turn with diamond nights and days, people did not remember so thick a fog; nor was there a thicker recorded in any chapter of tradition.  Indeed, if the expression be endurable, so black was the whiteness that it was difficult to know when morning came.  There was a fresher shiver in the cold, the sensibility that tree-tops were stirring, a filmy distinction of objects near at hand, and the possibility that somewhere ’way back in the east the rosy fingers of dawn were spread upon a clear horizon.  Collisions between ships at sea were reported, and many a good sailorman went down full fathom five to wait for the whistle of the Great Boatswain.

The little children on the island roused themselves and groped about among the chilled, dripping stems of the trees; they had no end in view, and no place to go, but motion was necessary for the lame legs and arms.  Margaret had caught a frightful cold and Aladdin a worse, and they were hungrier than should be allowed.  Now a jarred tree rained water down their necks, and now their faces went with a splash and sting into low-hanging plumes of leaves; often there would be a slip and a scrambling fall.  And by the time Aladdin had done grimacing over a banged shin, Margaret would have a bruised anklebone to cry about.  The poor little soul was very tired and penitent and cold and hurt and hungry, and she cried most of the time and was not to be comforted.  But Aladdin bit his lips and held his head up and said it all would be well sometime.  Perhaps, though he still had a little courage left, Aladdin was the more to be pitied of the two:  he was not only desperately responsible for it all, but full of imagination and the horrible things he had read.  Margaret, like most women, suffered a little from self-centration, and to her the trunk of a birch was just a nasty old wet tree, but to Aladdin it was the clammy limb of one drowned, and drawn from the waters to stand in eternal unrest.  At length the stumbling progress brought them to a shore of the island:  a slippery ledge of rock, past whose feet the water slipped hurriedly, steaming with fog as if it had been hot, two big leaning birches, and a ruddy mink that slipped like winking into a hole.  The river, evident for only a few yards, became lost in the fog, and where they were could only be guessed, and which way the tide was setting could only be learned by experiment.  Aladdin planted a twig at the precise edge of the water, and they sat down to watch.  Stubbornly and unwillingly the water receded from the twig, and they knew that the tide was running out.

“That’s the way home,” said Aladdin.  Margaret looked wistfully down-stream, her eyes as misty as the fog.

“If we had the boat we could go now,” said Aladdin.

Then he sat moody, evolving enterprise, and neither spoke for a long time.

“Marg’ret,” said Aladdin, at length, “help me find a big log near the water.”