s with a splendid twenty-foot jolly-boat, rigged with
lug-sail and centre-boom. In this I cruised north to Eskimo Bay,
harbouring at nights if possible, getting a local pilot when I could,
and once being taken bodily on board, craft and all, by a big friendly
fishing schooner. It proved a most profitable summer. I was so
dependent on the settlers and fishermen for food and hospitality that
I learned to know them as would otherwise have been impossible. Far
the best road to a seaman's heart is to let him do something for you.
Our impressions of a landscape, like our estimates of character, all
depend on our viewpoint. Fresh from the more momentous problems of
great cities, the interests and misunderstandings of small isolated
places bias the mind and make one censorious and resentful. But from
the position of a tight corner, that of needing help and hospitality
from entire strangers, one learns how large are the hearts and homes
of those who live next to Nature. If I knew the Labrador people before
(and among such I include the Hudson Bay traders and the Newfoundland
fishermen), that summer made me love them. I could not help feeling
how much more they gladly and freely did for me than I should have
dreamed of doing for them had they come along to my house in London. I
have sailed the seas in ocean greyhounds and in floating palaces and
in steam yachts, but better than any other I love to dwell on the
memories of that summer, cruising the Labrador in a twenty-footer.

That year I was late returning South. Progress is slow in the fall of
the year along the Labrador in a boat of that capacity. I was
weather-bound, with the snow already on the ground in Square Island
Harbour. The fishery of the settlers had been very poor. The traders
coming South had passed them by. There were eight months of winter
ahead, and practically no supplies for the dozen families of the
little village. I shall never forget the confidence of the patriarch
of the settlement, Uncle Jim, whose guest I was. The fact that we were
without butter, and that "sweetness" (molasses) was low, was scarcely
even noticed. I remember as if it were yesterday the stimulating tang
of the frosty air and the racy problem of the open sea yet to be
covered. The bag of birds which we had captured when we had driven in
for shelter from the storm made our dry-diet supper sweeter than any
Delmonico ten-course dinner, because we had wrested it ourselves from
the reluctant en