OFF GRAND 3£AXAN. 19 



oily-looking, and a morning fog hangs over it, smoking in thin 

 curtains that narrow the horizon to a little circle, and make 

 the sun a bright blur in the mist ? 



Mile after mile we are paddled, steered by the compass, 

 breaking the fog before us and seeing it close in behind, lifted 

 on the long ocean rollers that pulse in from outside as smooth as 

 glass, twenty feet from trough to roll, — the slow, long heave 

 of the slumbering ocean. This " old swell," which follows a 

 blow or rolls in from a distant oceanic gale, is rarely absent 

 from the open sea on our Eastern coasts. It throbs contin- 

 ually even in the calmest weather, and the " rote " of it as it 

 breaks against the cliffs, or drags down the rounded stones 

 upon the seaward beaches and rolls them up again, is a 

 ceaseless din. 



The long swells, green and bubbly like thick glass, as you 

 look into them under the shadow of the rosy fog, make no 

 noise, for they do not break ; but out of sight in the mist we 

 hear them thunder upon a sunken ledge. 



We hear, too, the snufEing and snarling of the seals fishing 

 in shallow water, which the Indian always regards as a warn- 

 ing to " ' Ware there ! " For the seal spends most of his idle 

 time lying upon the ledges, or else swimming around, waiting 

 for the tide to go down and uncover some half-tide rock. A 

 black guillemot — a " sea-pigeon," an Indian or fisherman 

 would call him — bobs upon the surface, or flies by on short, 

 quick-moving wings that, being party-colored, look like two 

 l^airs of wings, one white, the other black. He is a useless, 

 harmless, confiding little bird, with his red feet and pretty, 

 soft, mottled feathers, one of the auk family, and the only one 

 common along this coast in summer. 



Perhaps there is a tide streak where opposing currents 

 throw up a line of seaweed and ocean-drift in a long, winding 



