-at the masthead; the schooners are sometimes steered by a man aloft. The Always Loaded, sixty tons and bound home with a cargo that did honour to her name, struck one of the outlying islands so suddenly, so violently, that the lookout in the bow, who had been peering into the mist, was pitched headlong into the surf. The Daughter, running blind with a fair, light wind-she had been lost for a day—ran full tilt into a cliff; the men ran forward from the soggy gloom of the after-deck into-bright sunshine at the bow! It is the fog that wrecks ships.

"Oh, I runned her ashore," says the castaway skipper. "Thick? Why, sure, 'twas thick!"

So the men who sail that coast hate fog, fear it, avoid it when they can, which is seldom; they are not afraid of wind and sea, but there are times when they shake in their sea-boots, if the black fog catches them out of harbour.

I

III

SHIPS in PERIL

T is to be remarked that a wreck on the

Labrador coast excites no wide surprise.

Never a season passes but some craft are cast away. But that is merely the fortune of sailing those waters—a fortune which the mission-doctor accepts with a glad heart: it provides him with an interesting succession of adventures; life is not tame. Most men-I hesitate to say allhave been wrecked; every man, woman, and child who has sailed the Labrador has narrowly escaped, at least. And the fashion of that escape is sometimes almost incredible.

The schooner All's Well (which is a fictitious name) was helpless in the wind and sea and whirling snow of a great blizzard. At dusk she was driven inshore-no man knew

where. Strange cliffs loomed in the snow ahead; breakers-they were within stone's throw-flashed and thundered to port and starboard; the ship was driving swiftly into the surf. When she was fairly upon the rocks, Skipper John, then a hand aboard (it was he who told me the story), ran below and tumbled into his bunk, believing it to be the better place to drown in.

"Well, lads," said he to the men in the forecastle, "we got t' go this time. "Tis no use goin' on deck."

But the ship drove through a tickle no wider than twice her beam and came suddenly into the quiet water of a harbour!

The sealing-schooner Right and Tight struck on the Fish Rocks off Cape Charles in the dusk of a northeast gale. It is a jagged, black reef, outlying and isolated; the seas wash over it in heavy weather. It was a bitter gale; there was ice in the sea, and the wind was wild and thick with snow; she was driving before it-wrecked, blind,

utterly lost. The breakers flung her on the reef, broke her back, crunched her, swept the splinters on. Forty-two men were of a sudden drowned in the sea beyond; but the skipper was left clinging to the rock in a swirl of receding water.

"Us seed un there in the marnin'," said the old man of Cape Charles who told me the story. "He were stickin' to it like a mussel, with the sea breakin' right over un! 'Cod! he were!"

He laughed and shook his head; that was a tribute to the strength and courage with which the man on the reef had withstood the icy breakers through the night.

on.

"Look! us couldn't get near un," he went

""Twas clear enough t' see, but the wind was blowin' wonderful, an' the seas was too big for the skiff. Sure, I knows that; for us tried it.

"Leave us build a fire!' says my woman. 'Leave us build a fire on the head!' says she. "Twill let un know they's folk lookin' on.'

""Twas a wonderful big fire us set; an' it kep' us warm, so us set there all day watchin' the skipper o' the Right an' Tight on Fish Rocks. The big seas jerked un loose an' flung un about, an' many a one washed right over un; but nar a sea could carry un off. 'Twas a wonderful sight t' see un knocked off his feet, an' scramble round an' cotch hold somewheres else. 'Cod! it were-the way that man stuck t' them slippery rocks all day long!"

He laughed again-not heartlessly; it was the only way in which he could express his admiration.

"We tried the skiff again afore dark,” he continued; "but 'twasn't no use. The seas was too big. Sure, he knowed that so well as we. So us had t' leave un there all night. "He'll never be there in the marnin',' says my woman.

"You wait,' says I, 'an' you'll see. I'm thinkin' he will.'

"An' he was, zur-right there on Fish Rocks, same as ever; still stickin' on like the