Osmond had built himself, and made comfortable for summer and
winter: there being abundance of wood for ceiling, &c., and birch-rind
to cover the seams. He showed his gardens, full of flourishing
potatoes, where the disease had never yet reached. The vegetation is
very luxuriant, and there is plenty of pasture for cows. He could at
any time, he said, kill a deer, and had killed upwards of two hundred!
and as his neighbours in the bay all supply themselves with the same
food, the park must be supposed to be pretty large, and well stocked.
In the winter he kills foxes and martens for their skins, wild fowls
of various sorts for food. Fuel is superabundant. The water produces
fish,--salmon, herring, and mackerel; the ice brings the seals. Osmond
acknowledges that it was "very easy to get a living," and wanted only
the minister to be more than contented. His nearest neighbours (at
Lobster Harbour) are Roman Catholics, and with these he lives on very
good terms. "There was never a thee, or a thou, passed between them."
Such is Joseph Osmond, sole occupier of Seal Cove, in White Bay, and
such his condition, physical, social, and religious. It should be
added that not one person in the settlement can read. He complains
much of the French cutting spars and other sticks, besides what they
require for their use on shore; and yet more, of their leaving many
fires in the woods, by which the whole neighbourhood is endangered. He
has often gone to put out the fires thus carelessly left, by which
thousands of acres of wood might be destroyed, and the inhabitants
driven from their homes.

_Monday, July 18th. At Seal Cove._--This was our first day of delay
since coming into the Bay. A strong north-east wind with a heavy lop,
made it useless to attempt to proceed. In the afternoon all the people
on shore came to our service, and I explained "the articles of our
Belief, the Ten Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer." In the evening,
Mr. Tucker went on shore to teach the younger ones to repeat the
Lord's Prayer and the creed, more perfectly; and I, with the rest of
my party, rowed up "the Southern Arm," an indraft of about three
miles, winding among the most picturesque mountains I ever saw. They
rise almost perpendicularly from the water, are clothed with wood from
the base to the summit, and are of most varied shape and outline. They
surpass in grandeur the banks of the Wye, and are more thickly clothed
with wood, in which, the beech, and