superabundant fish.

By these methods vast quantities of cod and salmon are caught, and, as
in the old days when the hardy fishermen of Devon, Brittany, Normandy
and Portugal were the only workers in these little known seas,
practically all the catch is shipped to England and France. During the
war the cod fishers of Newfoundland played a very useful part in
mitigating the stringency of the British ration-cards, and there are
hopes that this good work may be extended, and that by setting up a big
refrigerating plant Newfoundland may enlarge her market in Britain and
the world.

With the fishery goes the more dangerous calling of sealing. For this
the men of Newfoundland set out in the winter and the spring to the
fields of flat "pan" ice to hunt the seal schools.

At times this means a march across the ice deserts for many days and
the danger of being cut off by blizzards; when that happens no more
news is heard of the adventurous hunters.

Every few years Newfoundland writes down the loss of a ship's company
of her too few young men, for Newfoundland, very little helped by
immigration, exists on her native born. "A crew every six or eight
years, we reckon it that way," you are told. It is part of the hard
life the Islanders lead, an expected debit to place against the profits
of the rich fur trade.

Solidly blocking the heart of Conception Bay is a big island, the high
and irregular outline of which seems to have been cut down sharply with
a knife. This is Bell Island, which is not so much an island as a
great, if accidental, iron mine.

Years ago, when the island was merely the home of farmers and
fishermen, a shipowner in need of easily handled ballast found that the
subsoil contained just the thing he wanted. By turning up the thin
surface he came upon a stratum of small, square slabs of rock rather
like cakes of soap. These were easily lifted and easily carted to his
ship.

He initiated the habit of taking rock from Bell Island for ballast, and
for years shipmasters loaded it up, to dump it overboard with just as
much unconcern when they took their cargo inboard. It was some time
before an inquiring mind saw something to attract it in the rock
ballast; the rock was analyzed and found to contain iron.

Turned into a profiteer by this astonishing discovery, the owner of the
ground where the slabs were found clung tenaciously to his holding
until he had forced the price up to the incredible figure o