oth as matter of paternal care and as a means of
increasing their own traffic,--by which the station is chiefly
sustained,--have done their utmost to make the natives bring in fish for
sale, and have failed. These people are first sealers, then hunters;
some attraction in the blood draws them to these occupations; and at
last it is an attraction in the blood which they obey.

Yet on the outermost surface of their existence they change, and die. At
Hopedale, out of a population of some two hundred, _twenty-four died in
the month of March last!_ At Nain, where the number of inhabitants is
about the same, twenty-one died in the same month; at Okkak, also
twenty-one. More than decimated in a month!

The long winter suffocation in their wooden dens, which lack the
ventilation of the _igloe_ that their untaught wit had devised, has
doubtless much to do with this mortality. But one feels that there is
somewhat deeper in the case. One feels that the hands of the great
horologe of time have hunted around the dial, till they have found the
hour of doom for this primeval race. Now at length the tolling bell says
to them, "No more! on the earth no more!"

Farewell, geological man, _chef-d'oeuvre_, it may be, of some earlier
epoch, but in this a grotesque, grown-up baby, never to become adult! As
you are, and as in this world you must be, I have seen you; but in my
heart is a hope for you which is greater than my thought,--a hope which,
though deep and sure, does not define itself to the understanding, and
must remain unspoken. There is a Heart to which you, too, are dear; and
its throbs are pulsations of Destiny.

DOCTOR JOHNS.

XI.

There were scores of people in Ashfield who would have been delighted to
speak consolation to the bereaved clergyman; but he was not a man to be
approached easily with the ordinary phrases of sympathy. He bore himself
too sternly under his grief. What, indeed, can be said in the face of
affliction, where the manner of the sufferer seems to say, "God has done
it, and God does all things well"? Ordinary human sympathy falls below
such a standpoint, and is wasted in the utterance.

Yet there are those, who delight in breaking in upon the serene dignity
which this condition of mind implies with a noisy proffer of
consolation, and an aggravating rehearsal of the occasion for it; as if
such comforters entertained a certain jealousy of the serenity they do
not comprehend, and were determined t