EIGHTH   OF   JANUARY.                     463
tributed bands of primitive colors, blending softly into the clear blue overhead; and then, by an almost magic transition, night occupying the western sky. Stars of the first magnitude, and a wandering planet here and there, shone dimly near the debatable line ; but a little further on were all the stars in their glory. The northern firmament had the familiar beauty of a pure winter night at home. The Pleiades glittered " like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver-braid," and the great stars that hang about the heads of Orion and Taurus were as intensely bright as if day was not looking out upon them from the other quarter of the sky. I had never seen night and day dividing the hemisphere so beautifully between them.
On the 8th we had, of course, our national festivities, and remembered freshly the hero who consecrated the day in our annals. The evening brought the theatricals again, with extempore interludes, and a hearty splicing of the main-brace. It was something new, and not thoroughly gladsome, this commemoration of the victory at New Orleans under a Polar sky. There were men not two hundred miles from us, now our partners in a nobler contest, who had bled in this very battle. But we made the best of the occasion ; and if others some degrees further to the south celebrated it more warmly, we had the thermometer on our side, with its —20°, a normal temperature for the " lauda-tur et alget."
But the sun was now gradually coming up toward the horizon: every day at meridian, and for an hour before and after, we were able to trace our progress eastward by some known headland. We had passed Cape Castlereagh and Cape Warrender in succession, and were close on the meridian of Cape Osborn.   The