Fear. He dwelt upon the unseen and the unknown till the burden of
eternity appeared to be crushing him. Everything in the Northland
had that crushing effect--the absence of life and motion; the
darkness; the infinite peace of the brooding land; the ghastly
silence, which made the echo of each heartbeat a sacrilege; the
solemn forest which seemed to guard an awful, inexpressible
something, which neither word nor thought could compass.

The world he had so recently left, with its busy nations and
great enterprises, seemed very far away. Recollections
occasionally obtruded--recollections of marts and galleries and
crowded thoroughfares, of evening dress and social functions, of
good men and dear women he had known--but they were dim memories
of a life he had lived long centuries agone, on some other
planet. This phantasm was the Reality. Standing beneath the
wind-vane, his eyes fixed on the polar skies, he could not bring
himself to realize that the Southland really existed, that at
that very moment it was a-roar with life and action.

There was no Southland, no men being born of women, no giving and
taking in marriage.

Beyond his bleak skyline there stretched vast solitudes, and
beyond these still vaster solitudes.

There were no lands of sunshine, heavy with the perfume of
flowers. Such things were only old dreams of paradise. The
sunlands of the West and the spicelands of the East, the smiling
Arcadias and blissful Islands of the Blest--ha! ha! His laughter
split the void and shocked him with its unwonted sound. There was