into view above the limitless white desolation. Along the southerly bases of the rocks, and in every sunward-facing, sheltered hollow, where the harsh soil was bare of snow and thawed and warmed to a depth of two or three inches over its foundations of impregnable frost, a film of light but vivid green was springing into hurried life, and already starred thick with tiny blooms, pink, yellow, and ethereal lavender, all in haste to fertilize and be fertilized, and to ripen their precious seeds and drop them back into the mould, ere the night of cold should again close down upon them. Amid the blooms bustled innumerable tiny flies and gleaming beetles, with here and there a flickering mite of a butterfly, paper-white or pallid mauve. Over the faces of the rocks were spreading stains and smudges of pinkish grey and dull greenish yellow, where the newborn lichens were reproducing themselves in the fecundating radiance. The still air was faintly musical with the babble of innumerable rills.
At one point, through some whim of tide and current, the ice-floe had drawn quite clear of the shore, leaving some three hundred yards of beach un-covered. It was a beach ribbed with ice-ground ridges of purple-black rock, which now, at low tide, held a miscellaneous drift of weeds and disrooted mussels and stranded crustaceans in their shallow intervening pools.
