Notting grow. All level."

Within some one hundred and fifty miles of the coast this terrible
table-land breaks up into wild hills, separated by valleys that plunge
down suddenly, in rocky steeps, from the heights, more gorges than
valleys. These hills are all fearfully scarred. One sees in them
abundant record of the Titanic old-time warfare between rock and ice. A
prodigious contest it was. Sometimes the top of a hill--clean, live
rock--was sliced off, as with a knife. "Like the tops of our conical
cheeses, when they came to the table," said P----

The valleys are wooded with fir, spruce, larch, and, more to the south,
with birch. At a distance from the sea and in favorable situations these
trees grow to good forest size, even beyond the middle latitudes of
Labrador. In latitude 53 deg. a resident told me that trees were found
eighteen inches in diameter. This statement was derided when I told it
on board, and the witty Judge kept the table in a roar for half an hour
with pleasantries about it. But at Hopedale, two and a half degrees
farther north, we learned that sticks of timber fifty feet in length
were often brought to the station; while one had found its way there
which was fifty-six feet long and ten inches in diameter at the smaller
end.

Toward the sea these forests dwindle, till on the immediate coast they
wholly disappear. At Caribou Island, which, the reader will remember, is
_south_ of the Strait of Belle Isle, I found in a ravine some sadly
stunted spruces, firs, and larches, not more than three feet
high,--melancholy, wind-draggled, frightened-looking shrubs, which had
wondrously the air of lifelong ill-usage. The tangled tops were mostly
flattened and pressed over to one side, and altogether they seemed so
piteous, that one wished to say, "Nobody shall do so to you any more,
poor things!" Excepting these, the immediate coast, for five or six
hundred miles that we skirted it, was absolutely treeless.

Up in the bays, however, trees were found, and, curiously enough, they
were larger and more plentiful in high latitudes than farther south.
This puzzled me much at first. Evidently, however, it was due in part to
the nature of the rock. At Sleupe Harbor, latitude 51 deg., this was
granite;[C] farther on it was sienite; then the sienite showed a strong
predominance of feldspar; then it became an impure Labradorite; then
passed into gneiss; the gneiss became soft, stratified, and frequently
intersected by