Page:Life with the Esquimaux - 1864 - Volume 1.djvu/105

 moments before, I had noticed these bergs as mere pigmies. Now the pigmies had become giants! 'Nature on a spree' had given to mere snowballs on the horizon all the beauty and symmetry of 'Bunker's Hill Monument,' running high up, in alabaster columns, to prop the azure sky!

"Soon the moon came rolling up; and what a phase or face it showed, with its woefully distorted countenance! I took my Nautical Almanac for the year (1860), and there found, 'August 1st,' the sign for ! The large round circle stared me in the face. There could be no mistake. A moon 'as big and round as a cart-wheel'—as we boys used



to say—should be the aspect of fair Luna in the heavens this night. But here was the rising moon 'up to time,' yet where was the full moon? The moon as it ought to be was a moon somewhere else, not here; for, as it ascended above the horizon, its lower limb was like a crushed hat, then as a drunkard's face—fiery red, and swollen out to its utmost limit of expansion! Sketching as it then appeared, the preceding may give the idea, so unnatural was the goddess as she arose from her ocean bed to-night. But this, however, did not last long. A few moments sufficed to carry her upward in her regal course beyond the influence of 'Nature on a spree,' and a short time afterward, as I looked again, I found