time it often seemed an unnecessary expenditure of
effort in an already overcrowded day, one now values the records of
the early days of one's life on the coast. In my notebook for 1895 I
find the following: "The desolation of Labrador at this time is easy
to understand. No Newfoundlanders were left north of us; not a vessel
in sight anywhere. The ground was all under snow, and everything
caught over with ice except the sea. I think that I must describe one
house, for it seems a marvel that any man could live in it all winter,
much less women and children. It was ten feet by twenty, one storey
high, made of mud and boards, with half a partition to divide bedroom
from the sitting-room kitchen. If one adds a small porch filled with
dirty, half-starved dogs, and refuse of every kind, an ancient and
dilapidated stove in the sitting part of the house, two wooden benches
against the walls, a fixed rude table, some shelves nailed to the
wall, and two boarded-up beds, one has a fairly accurate description
of the furnishings. Inside were fourteen persons, sleeping there, at
any rate for a night or two. The ordinary regular family of a man and
wife and four girls was to be increased this winter by the man's
brother, his wife, and four boys from twelve months to seven years of
age. His brother had 'handy enough flour,' but no tea or molasses. The
owner was looking after Newfoundland Rooms, for which he got flour,
tea, molasses, and firewood for the winter. The people assure me that
one man, who was aboard us last fall just as we were going South,
starved to death, and many more were just able to hold out till
spring. The man, they tell me, ate his only dog as his last resource."

I sent one day a barrel of flour and some molasses to a poor widow
with seven children at Stag Islands. She was starving even in summer.
She was just eating fish, which she and her eldest girl caught, and
drinking water--no flour, no tea, nothing. Two winters before she and
her eldest girl sawed up three thousand feet of planking to keep the
wolf from the little ones. The girl managed the boat and fished in
summer, drove the dogs and komatik and did the shooting for which they
could afford powder in winter.

A man, having failed to catch a single salmon beyond what he was
forced to eat, left in his little boat to row down to the Inlet to try
for codfish. To get a meal--breakfast--and a little flour to sustain
life on the way, he had to sell his anchor b