the sea in heavy weather; barren hills, rising abruptly-and all isolated-from safe water; sunken rocks, disclosed, upon approach, only by the green swirl above them. They are countless-scattered everywhere, hidden and disclosed. They lie in the mouths of harbours, they lie close to the coast, they lie offshore; they run twenty miles out to sea. Here is no plain sailing; the skipper must be sure of the way-or choose it gingerly: else the hidden rock will inevitably "pick him up."

"An

Recently the doctor was "picked up." "Oh, yes," says he, with interest. uncharted rock. It took two of the three blades of the propeller. But, really, you'd be surprised to know how well the ship got along with one!"

To know the submerged rocks of one harbour and the neighbouring coast, however evil the place, is small accomplishment. The Newfoundland lad of seven years would count himself his father's shame if he failed

in so little. High tide and low tide, quiet sea and heavy swell, he will know where he can take the punt-the depth of water, to an inch, which overlies the danger spots. But here are a hundred harbours-a thousand miles of coast-with reefs and islands. scattered like dust the length of it. The man who sails the Labrador must know it all like his own back yard-not in sunny weather alone, but in the night, when the headlands are like black clouds ahead, and in the mist, when the noise of breakers tells him all that he may know of his whereabouts. A flash of white in the gray distance, a thud and swish from a hidden place: the one is his beacon, the other his fog-horn. It is thus, often, that the doctor gets along.

You may chart rocks, and beware of them; but it is a proverb on the coast"there's no chart for icebergs." The Labrador current is charged with them-hard, dead-white glacier ice from the Arctic:

massive bergs, innumerable, all the while shifting with tide and current and wind. What with floes and bergs-vast fields of drift-ice-the way north in the spring is most perilous. The same bergs- widely scattered, diminished in number, dwarfed by the milder climate-give the transatlantic passenger evil dreams: somewhere in the night, somewhere in the mist, thinks he, they may lie; and he shudders. The skipper of the Labrador craft knows that they lie thick around him there is no surmise; when the night fell, when the fog closed in, there were a hundred to be counted from the masthead.

Violent winds are always to be feared— swift, overwhelming hurricanes : winds that catch the unwary. They are not frequent; but they do blow-will again blow, no man can tell when. In such a gale, forty vessels were driven on a lee shore; in another, eighty were wrecked overnight-two thousand fishermen cast away, the coast littered with splinters of ships-and, once (it is but

an incident), a schooner was torn from her anchors and flung on the rocks forty feet above the high-water mark. These are exceptional storms; the common Labrador gale is not so violent, but evil enough in its own way. It is a northeaster, of which the barometer more often than not gives fair warning; day after day it blows, cold, wet, foggy, dispiriting, increasing in violence, subsiding, returning again, until courage and strength are both worn out.

Reefs, drift-ice, wind and sea-and over all the fog thick, wide-spread, persistent, swift in coming, mysterious in movement; it compounds the dangers. It blinds menthey curse it, while they grope along: a desperate business, indeed, thus to run by guess where positive knowledge of the way merely mitigates the peril. There are days when the fog lies like a thick blanket on the face of the sea, hiding the head-sails from the man at the wheel; it is night on deck, and broad day-with the sun in a blue sky