from one to another, crossing fissures, holding to the moss hand and foot and with difficulty, for about a mile, when suddenly we came upon the deserted mansion of a Labrador sealer. It looked snug outside, and we entered it. It was formed of short slabs, all very well greased with seal oil; an oven without a pipe, a salt-box hung on a wooden peg, a three-legged stool, and a wooden box of a bedstead, with a flour-barrel containing some hundreds of seine-floats, and an old Seal seine, completed the list of goods and chattels. Three small windows, with four panes of glass each, were still in pretty good order, and so was the low door, which moved on wooden hinges, for which the maker has received no patent, I'll be bound. This cabin made of hewn logs, brought from the main, was well put together, about twelve feet square, well roofed with bark of birch and spruce, thatched with moss, and every aperture rendered air-tight with oakum. But it was deserted and abandoned; the Seals are all caught, and the sealers have nought to do here now-a-days. We found a pile of good hard wood close to this abode, which we will have removed on board our vessel to-morrow. I discovered that this cabin had been the abode of two French Canadians; first, because their almanac, written with chalk on one of the logs, was in French; and next, the writing was in two very different styles. As we returned to our vessel I paused several times to contemplate the raging waves breaking on the stubborn, precipitous rocks beneath us, and thought how dreadful they would prove to any one who should be wrecked on so inhospitable a shore. No vessel, the captain assured me, could stand the sea we gazed upon at that moment, and I fully believed him, for the surge dashed forty feet or more high against the precipitous rocks. The Ravens flew above us, and a few Gulls beat to windward by dint of superior sailing; the horizon was hid by fog, so thick there, and on the crest of the island, that it looked like dense smoke. Though I
