lost in starting, though well spent as far
as preparedness went. Nothing was wanting when at last, in the second
week of June, the tugboat let us go, and crowds of friends waved us
good-bye from the pier-head as we passed out with our bunting
standing. We had not intended to touch land again until it should rise
out of the western horizon, but off the south coast of Ireland we met
with heavy seas and head winds, so we ran into Crookhaven to visit our
colleagues who worked at that station. Our old patients in that lonely
corner were almost as interested as ourselves in the new venture, and
many were the good eggs and "meals of greens" which they brought down
to the ship as parting tokens. Indeed, we shrewdly guessed that our
"dry" principles alone robbed us of more than "one drop o' potheen"
whose birth the light of the moon had witnessed.

As we were not fortunate in encountering fair winds, it was not until
the twelfth day that we saw our first iceberg, almost running into it
in a heavy fog. The fall in the temperature of the sea surface had
warned us that we were in the cold current, and three or four days of
dense fog emphasized the fact. As it was midsummer, we felt the change
keenly, when suddenly on the seventeenth day the fog lifted, and a
high evergreen-crowned coast-line greeted our delighted eyes. A lofty
lighthouse on a rocky headland enabled us almost immediately to
discover our exact position. We were just a little north of St. John's
Harbour, which, being my first landfall across the Atlantic, impressed
me as a really marvellous feat; but what was our surprise as we
approached the high cliffs which guard the entrance to see dense
columns of smoke arising, and to feel the offshore wind grow hotter
and hotter as the pilot tug towed us between the headlands. For the
third time in its history the city of St. John's was in flames.

The heat was fierce when we at last anchored, and had the height of
the blaze not passed, we should certainly have been glad to seek again
the cool of our icy friends outside. Some ships had even been burned
at their anchors. We could count thirteen fiercely raging fires in
various parts of the city, which looked like one vast funeral pyre.
Only the brick chimneys of the houses remained standing blackened and
charred. Smoke and occasional flame would burst out here and there as
the fickle eddies of wind, influenced, no doubt, by the heat, whirled
around as if in sport over the scene