CHAPTER IV. 



A FALL HUNTING TRIP IN NEWFOUNDLAND. 



I STARTED for my first trip in Newfoundland on the 

 23rd of October, 1903. I had landed on the island 

 some weeks earlier, on my way to the Labrador, and 

 the second shooting season had already commenced, 

 when the Virginia Lake, returning from the peninsula, 

 carried me for a second time between the two dark bluffs 

 that guard St. John's Harbour. St. John's is a town of 

 steep streets and cobbles, built about the hill-bound 

 mouth of the estuary which forms the roadstead. 

 Often drenched in sea mists, sometimes blurred with 

 rain, yet on a blue September day, when the mists have 

 gone, or only drift in tatters about the brown heights, 

 with an iceberg, picturesque if dangerous, stranded in 

 the narrows, it is as beautiful a place in its own way as 

 any town in North America that I have seen, saving 

 only Quebec. 



The inhabitants of St. John's may all be said to derive 

 their living from the sea. Clusters of sealers and 

 whalers lie anchored in mid-harbour, busy schooners ply 

 for cod to the Labrador and the Banks, while many of 

 the business houses have their own private wharves. 

 Pelts, fur and fish, all the products of the Arctic, find 

 their way to this emporium of the ocean, and as the sea 

 is fickle, so trade and prosperity there suffer a more than 

 common tyranny of ebb and flow. In spring, when the 

 sealers go forth for their three weeks' season, no one 



