BONNE ESPERANCE IN WINTER. 189 



was put upon my plate, clouded my vision to all other surround- 

 ings, so that I had eyes for this and nothing else, while I lost all 

 sense of the outer world in contemplation of that delicious plate 

 of food that was being passed to me. The tea with both milk and 

 sugar — for Mr. Whitely's is one of three families on the coast that 

 keep a cow — proved an excellent beverage ; while a real currant 

 pudding presented an additional feature that was wholly irresistible. 

 My friends must have thought me a barbarian and half starved at 

 that ; the latter I was without doubt. 



Few changes had occurred at Bonne since my visit there in the 

 fall. The ice had frozen in the bay in front of the house, and snow 

 still topped the summits of the island ; big drifts lay about here 

 and there, showing the general direction of the wind in heaping 

 them up, but no one had attempted to dig through them, and it 

 would indeed have been labor lost since the wind would surely 

 have filled the paths in a single night to their former height. The 

 male portion of the family occupied their time chiefly in most in- 

 teresting conversation about deer and deer hunting, and some 

 eighteen or twenty men had already gone off into the country on a 

 hunt ; the unusual abundance of these animals had fully raised 

 a deer craze that attracted nearly all the eligible young men of the 

 coast. Already some thirty deer had been killed, and others were 

 reported every day. I saw a beautiful head and horns of a young 

 buck shot by my friend, and it truly was a beauty. One man 

 twice killed two deer with a single ball ; this is remarkably fine 

 shooting and shots of this kind are only made by a good hunter 

 and one of steady nerves and eye. The deer, it is said, are very 

 tame ; but a man must stand a great deal and be able to walk many 

 miles a day if he would become a deer hunter in this country ; and 

 though I do not suppose I shall attempt a trip of this kind, I can 

 yet hope that chance may throw me in the way of shooting one 

 of these fine animals. This has been the only fresh meat that the 

 people about the river have had this winter, excepting the small 

 piece each received of the cow that was killed late in the fall. 



