Page:The cruise of the Corwin.djvu/131

 pleasant time with Captains Millard and Kelly. Very telling views of the sculpture of the mountains along the Bay, at its head, and at the mouth, where the land-ice flowed into the one grand glacier that filled Bering Strait and Sea. The fronting cliffs of the sea glacier seem to be hardly more weathered than those of Plover Bay and adjacent fiords.

St. Michael, Alaska, June 20, 1881.

Sunshine now in the Far North, sunshine all the long nightless days! ripe and mellow and hazy, like that which feeds the fruits and vines! We came into it two days ago when we were approaching this old-fashioned Russian trading post near the mouth of the Yukon River. How sweet and kindly and reviving it is after so long a burial beneath dark, sleety storm clouds! For a whole month before the beginning of this bright time, it snowed every day more or less, perhaps only for an hour or two, or all the twenty-four hours; not one day on which snow did not fall either in wet, sleety blasts, making sludge on the deck and rigging and afterward freezing fast, or in dry crystals, blowing away as fast as it fell. I have never before seen so cloudy a month, weather so strangely bewildering and depressing. It was all one stormy day, broken here and there by 85