.202 SCENE ON BRADORE HEIGHTS. 



birds, with their huge scissors-shaped, horny bills, collect in the sum- 

 mer and breed in large companies. Their nests are made in holes 

 in the ground, which is tunnelled with their burrows in every 

 direction. A great trick of the inhabitants with strangers who visit 

 this island is to get some person — the greener the better — to 

 put his hand into the hole when the bird is within sitting upon its 

 eggs. If you could but see the bill, you would readily understand 

 why the attempt is never made a second time. Imagine a huge pair 

 of horny scissors, two inches long, two inches high at the base, and 

 half an inch thick yielded with force, and no wonder one does not 

 care to repeat the experiment. 



As the ice in Bradore bay was not all quite fast, that is, as open 

 water appeared on it in many places, we were obliged to take to 

 the hills and cross by the land. The hills and high cliffs which 

 everywhere skirt the north shore, sometimes almost perpendicular to 

 the water at their base, sustain a plateau extending far back into the 

 country. A mass of hillocks crowns its summit, varying from 

 two hundred and seventy-five to three hundred and twenty-five 

 feet above the sea-level. The whole plateau, if I may so call it, 

 spreads out for a long distance inland, and forms nearly or quite all 

 the country upon the upper side of the bay line. During our whole 

 ride over these hills the constant sight of something new, the 

 unlooked-for contrasts presented here and there, rendered the trip 

 across them a source of pleasure and delight — one well worthy 

 the express journey of some geologist or glacial specialist, who 

 should read to us the sermons these rocks contain. Now a long and 

 wide (almost level) plain with its rather uneven surface would end in 

 a row of low crests of unequal height, beyond which the slope would 

 carry us some fifty or seventy-five feet to a pond ; beyond a varied 

 plain and hilly patch of ground would often give place to another 

 pond, almost at a level with the surrounding hillocks. Snow covered 

 almost everything, and only the rounded or broken hill-tops, and 

 the rough pieces scattered from their place in the rock thus crushed, 

 or scattered over the slopes by some mighty agency, here and there, 



