He would set about it
directly.--Here was work for the rest of the winter!
His first step must be to go home and have his dinner; his next--to
consult George Macwha, who had been a ship-carpenter in his youth. He
would run over in the evening before George should have dropped work,
and commit the plan to his judgment.
In the evening, then, Alec reached the town, on his way to George
Macwha. It was a still lovely night, clear and frosty, with--yes, there
were--millions of stars overhead. Away in the north, the streamers were
shooting hither and thither, with marvellous evanescence and
re-generation. No dance of goblins could be more lawless in its
grotesqueness than this dance of the northern lights in their ethereal
beauty, shining, with a wild ghostly changefulness and feebleness, all
colours at once; now here, now there, like a row of slender
organ-pipes, rolling out and in and along the sky. Or they might have
been the chords of some gigantic stringed instrument, which chords
became visible only when mighty hands of music struck their keys and
set them vibrating; so that, as the hands swept up and down the Titanic
key-board, the chords themselves seemed to roll along the heavens,
though in truth some vanished here and others appeared yonder.
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