d by the Newfoundland Government to carry the mails during
the fishing season to points on the Labrador coast as far north as
Nain. She is also one of the sealing fleet that goes to "the ice" each
tenth of March. When she brings back her cargo of seals to St. Johns,
she takes up her summer work of carrying mail, passengers, and freight
to The Labrador--always a welcome visitor to the exiled fishermen in
that lonely land, the one link that binds them to home and the outside
world. She has on board a physician to set broken bones and deal out
drugs to the sick, and a customs officer to see that not a dime's worth
of merchandise of any kind or nature is landed until a good round
percentage of duty is paid to him as the representative of the
Newfoundland Government, which holds dominion over all the east coast
of Labrador. This customs officer is also a magistrate, a secret
service officer, a constable, and what not I do not know--pretty much
the whole Labrador Government, I imagine.

The accommodations on the Virginia Lake were quite inadequate for the
number of passengers she carried. The stuffy little saloon was so
crowded that comfort was out of the question. I had to use some rather
impressive language to the steward to induce him to assign to me a
stateroom. Finally, he surrendered his own room. The ventilation was
poor and the atmosphere vile, but we managed to pull through. Our
fellow-passengers were all either prospectors or owners of fishing
schooners.

There was much ice to be seen when the heavy veil of grey fog lifted
sufficiently for us to see anything, and until we had crossed the
Strait of Belle Isle our passage was a rough one. It was on the Fourth
of July that we saw for the first time the bleak, rock-bound coast of
Labrador. In all the earth there is no coast so barren, so desolate,
so brutally inhospitable as the Labrador coast from Cape Charles, at
the Strait of Belle Isle on the south, to Cape Chidley on the north.
Along these eight hundred miles it is a constant succession of bare
rocks scoured clean and smooth by the ice and storms of centuries, with
not a green thing to be seen, save now and then a bunch of stunted
shrubs that have found a foothold in some sheltered nook in the rocks,
and perchance, on some distant hill, a glimpse of struggling spruce or
fir trees. It is a fog-ridden, dangerous coast, with never a
lighthouse or signal of any kind at any point in its entire length to
wa