neck at such cost all
that long distance.

Many inexplicable things happen "on Labrador." Thus, one year while
visiting at the head of Hamilton Inlet, a Scotch settler came aboard
to ask my advice about a large animal that had appeared round his
house. Though he had sat up night after night with his gun, he had
never seen it. His children had seen it several times disappearing
into the trees. The French agent of Revillon Freres, twenty miles
away, had come over, and together they had tracked it, measured the
footmarks in the mud, and even fenced some of them round. The stride
was about eight feet, the marks as of the cloven hoofs of an ox. The
children described the creature as looking like a huge hairy man; and
several nights the dogs had been driven growling from the house into
the water. Twice the whole family had heard the creature prowling
around the cottage, and tapping at the doors and windows. The now
grown-up children persist in saying that they saw this wild thing.
Their house is twenty miles up the large Grand River, and a hundred
and fifty miles from the coast.

An old fellow called Harry Howell was one winter night missing from
his home. He had been hunting, and only too late, after a blizzard set
in, was it discovered that he was absent. In the morning the men
gathered to make a search, but at that moment in walked "old Harry"!
He told me later that he was coming home in the afternoon when the
blizzard began. It was dirty, thick of snow, and cold. Suddenly he
heard bells ringing, and knew that it was fairies bidding him follow
them--because he had followed them before. So off he went, pushing his
way through the driving snow. When at last he reached the foot of a
gnarled old tree in the forest, the bells stopped, and he knew that
was the place where he must stay for the night. So he laid some of the
partridges which he had killed into a hole in the snow close to the
trunk, crawled down and used them for a seat, and placed the rest of
the frozen birds at his feet. Then he pulled up his dickey, or kossak,
over his head, and with his back to the tree, went to sleep while the
snow was still driving. There was no persuading that man that the
ringing bells were in his own imagination.

Many years ago a Norwegian captain on the Labrador told me the
following story. One day the carpenter of his schooner, a man whom he
had known for three voyages, and trusted thoroughly, was steering on
the course which the ma