200 FIVE LEAGUES AND VICINITY. 



and glittered in the sun, most treacherous and cutting to the dogs' 

 feet, the precursors and frequent occasion of that malady, so terrible 

 in these regions, snow blindness — and continued our course — with 

 a glimpse of the far-off shores of Newfoundland, towards which 

 spread an icy plain with a distant channel of open water, at our right, 

 and the shore, skirted with the broken and fantastically shaped 

 blocks of ice that lay piled, in all sorts of positions, on or against 

 each other often several feet high, like tide marks on the left, — 

 across the three full miles of Five Leagues Harbor to Five Leagues 

 Point, the residence of a well known and thrifty fisherman and 

 seal-catcher. Taking a cup of tea here, we continued our way to 

 Middle Bay, on the east side of which, with another friendly ac- 

 quaintance, we took our dinner and nooning before continuing 

 farther. As we had made full sixteen miles since morning, both 

 the dogs and ourselves needed and enjoyed this rest. After our din- 

 ner, which consisted of bread and tea, the latter a concoction of the 

 twigs or rather boughs of the spruce, which are often used as a 

 substitute for the real article and so carefully prepared that it is 

 sometimes hard to distinguish from an inferior quality of it, we har- 

 nessed our dogs, and were once more on our journey. 



I cannot quite recollect the exact position of the house of this 

 hospitable fisherman, or of a large, old-fashioned, red-painted, 

 country looking house that we passed somewhere here, which looked 

 more like a comfortable establishment than any I had seen for a 

 long while, and which, though I did not stop there, no doubt 

 would have fully equalled the expectations excited from the outside 

 appearance. Behind this was another of those peculiar ridges 

 such as have been mentioned as occurring in other localities. As 

 the direction of Middle Bay is about north northeast, this narrow 

 ridge barely separates the eastern baylet — if I may use the word — 

 of the bottom of the bay, from the western baylet of the opposite 

 or Belles Amour Bay. The intervening neck (the ridge I have 

 mentioned) extends outward on either side and forms a square 

 block of land nearly two miles each way ; on this are one or two 



