Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 November 1894 — ARCTIC COLOR. [ARTICLE]

ARCTIC COLOR.

Brilliant Hues and Skies of Sur> passing Loveliness. Frederick Wilbert Stokes, who was a member of the first Peary Relief Expedition, gives a new idea of the . charms of Arctic landscapes in a paper on “Color at the Far North,” which he has written for the September number of The Century. Despite the desolation, he found, from an artistic standpoint, a land of beauty, with seas and skies of surpassing loveliness. The intensity and brilliance of color impress the beholder as something supernatural. Our sojourn was from the middle of July, through. August, and a few days of September—a period when the polar latitudes are teeming with animal, insect, and plant life. Of this brief period only am I qualified to speak; but from the accounts given by those who have- passed through the long, dreaded night season, the phenomena occurring in the heavens are most beautiful. The chief peculiarity of color at the north, so far as my short experience tells me, is that there are no semitones, the general effect being either very black or just the opposite, intensely brilliant and rich in color. In fact, a summer’s midnight at the North has all the brilliance of our brightest noon, with the added intensity and richness of our most vivid sunsets, while noon, when the sun is obscured by threatening masses of storm-clouds, is black. Indeed, it is the true land of “impressionalism.”

I remember one brilliant morning when the measureless ether overhead, a hue of exquisite blue, repeated itself in the perfect mirror of the sea. Far away, on the otherwise clear cut horizon, a line of pure white ice shimmered its light up through a pinkish, yellow stratum of . mist which bathed in delicate, greenish blue an enormous iceberg that strongly resembled an ancient cathedral. In the afternoon the sky,* a threatening black, overhung a vast, contorted sheet of white arid pink, composed of ice-floe and colossal bergs looming up above its mass at intervals, with deep, black patches of water, the whole carrying tho eye to the horizon—a tapering band of deep, rich blue merging into the sky. In the immediate foreground of the ice-floe, near the water’s edge, were shallow pools of delicate blues, purples, and greens. Of the wealth of color in flower, lichen, and moss; of its curious riches as manifested in insect, shell, and animal life, and of its wonderful limning skill as shown on the great inland ice, ice-cap-and glacier, I have neither purpose nor pen to write. This new world of color awaits the one who can truly describe it. In all these color effects at the North there lies a wizard-like power of enchantment — a distinctive uncanniness that, basilisk-like, both attracts and repels. Great nature's pitilessness broods over it with a force and penetration possibly not equaled, and surely not surpassed, in any other quarter of our globe. It is a land of beautiful and awesome dreams. Getting Even With the Judge. A Maine Congressman tells a good story of a veteran lawyer up in his State who more than equalled Ben Butler in his famous quarrel with a Rhode Island Judge over his attempt to conceal his contempt for the Court. The Maine barrister was a man of very plain speech, and on one occasion he told a presiding magistrate very plainly what he thought of his decision. The Judge promptly fined hiip SSO. “All right,” said the lawyer: “I have a note against you for SIOO which I have been trying to collect for the past ten years, and I’ll indorse it over to you. I never expected to get that much for it,” and without a word he pulled the- note out of his pocket and .indorsed it over. Tins Judge had nothing further to say.—[Washington Times. SHE COULDN’T UNDERSTAND. “Oh, it is awful,” said Mrs. Summervisit, “the way those poor fire* men on the Atlantic liners have to tfiM’JitiiMdie heat. Away down in the hold, you know, in a temperature of over a hundred degrees all the time.” “Why don’t they open the winders?” asked Mrs. Jason.—[lndianapolis Journal.