I.
The sun has at last gone down for good, has sunk below the horizon, to stay there for five long months. For
days it has been near the hills, circling around and around, falling nearer to the horizon at every revolution. But yesterday it was behind the hills all day, only showing itself for an hour through the low place in the southern hills. The people were all out, bidding it farewell, and a din they did make, as they shouted in choruses their parting salutes, wishing their warm friend a pleasant journey and a safe return to them.
But today the sun is gone, though it is as light as day. Continually, the grayness of sundown will gradually deepen into dark as the sun sinks away from us to the more favored lands to the South. So goodby, sun, for another, cold, and dark winter night. Yes; come again to me also, and bring with you warmth and light of soul and heart as well as the warmth that quickens the body and the light that gladdens the eye!
I am beginning this writing by the light that is yet in the sky; but after a time I shall have to trim and light my lamp, and keep it burning continually during my waking hours. I must have good light for this work. I can see that, for my writing must be small and I must put as much as possible of it on my paper. My only blank book is not very large, and if this account ever reaches the world proper and is made known to the inhabitants thereof, the printer who sets it into type will have to look carefully, and on both sides of the paper at that. How much I shall write, I cannot now tell-it may be before I get through, I may spin out quite a story. I have material enough, goodness knows!
From my open window I look out over this land of the north. It is the month of September down in what I yet call home, and I know that if the winter season is early, the trees are about bare of leaves, the grass is brown, and the air is sharp and cold. That is just about what it is here. I can see from my second-story room, the bare fields, stretching away from the houses near at hand to the houses
in the distance. The birch and the willow have lost their leaves; and the fir, its brightness. In the dim distance the haze of autumn blends with the grayness of departing day; yet there is no hush as in other climes at such a time. There is yet life and animation over all this land, and this activity will not cease until the last of the sunlight departs from the sky; yet, even then, the energy is only changed in form and not permitted to lie dormant. The children are playing in the yard below-I hear their merry laughter as I write, and I pause to look down at them. As they see me looking from the window, they greet me with shouts, and little Rachel throws me a tuft of green. Her aim is sure, and it alights on my open book. It is a bunch of mignonette. I put the little bouquet in a cup of water, and its fragrance fills the room, mingling with the sweet odor of a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley.
I have been here in the Land of the NORTH POLE now nearly five years; but until the present I have not felt able to set down in writing the things. that I have seen and heard. I now undestand the language of the people well enough to get along, and so I think this winter I shall write out my history as pertains as how I came here, what I have seen and heard and done. Whether or not any living soul will ever read these lines rests entirely with the providences of the Lord; but I feel that it is my duty to do this much at any rate. I am writing this, as I have stated before, on a blank book which I brought with me, with my fountain pen filled with ink made and used in this land; but perhaps now I'd better start at the beginning of my account, and tell of things in the order of their happening.

II.
home, and so the selection of a name for the baby devolved altogether on my mother. Nikolai was her father's name, and Loner was the name of the village from which she had come, and as both had fond recollections about them for her, she gave their names to me as an inheritance. But such names, one may be sure, would not long remain intact in America, the land of abbreviations and nicknames. Nikolai could hardly be shortened into Nick, so Loner lost the last syllable; and thus it came about that I became Lon Merton.
Very little of my history from my childhood until I was a man pertains to this narrative. During my youth we moved from Chicago further west. I was an only child. I had the advantages of a common school education. I learned to work on the farm; I traveled considerably in a number of the western states, and thus picked up a good deal of all-round information. Before I was twenty I lost both my father and mother. They had accumulated some property which was left to me.
For ten years I lived at the old home, sowing, irrigating, reaping, studying, learning the lessons of life in various ways. It seems to me now that in those ten years on that farm, with the eternal hills on one side, and the open valley on the other, I lived a complete life. If toil and rest, sunshine and clouds, hopes and fears, love and loss - if all these make up a life, then I lived mine there, and it seems to me that I should have completed it there, but now the ways of God are wonderful, and not to be found out, at least not by me, it seems.
Of that which came into my life, and drove me away from home, made me a wanderer on the earth, I shall say as little as possible in these pages. That concerns no human soul but mine, and the divine heart of One Above. I shall say as little as possible about that, but then it may be impossible to keep it back-it is hard to suppress that which is continually in the heart and in the brain, and even now when I think of that time, I feel as though I could fill these pages with a flood as from my heart - but, no; that would clearly be a waste of precious space.

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