FIRST SIGHT OF LABRADOR 



marvelled at the wealth of wild flowers ; they were 

 everywhere, rearing their heads among the unpro- 

 mising stones, and blooming in profusion amid the 

 thick moss that carpeted the ground. Some of them 

 I knew delicate harebells, and tall foxgloves, and 

 humble scentless violets, and yellow dandelions and 

 some were strange to me. I found when I gathered a 

 bunch that they soon withered : it seemed as if they 

 were living in a hurry ; springing up from the sodden, 

 half-frozen sprinkling of soil that barely covers the 

 rocks, and bursting into brilliant bloom, and withering 

 away, all in the space of a summer that only lasts six 

 or seven weeks. Surely they were making the most 

 of their chance of living : I had hardly thought that 

 the land of Labrador could look so gay. The butter- 

 flies were flitting to and fro ; the grasshoppers were 

 about, with their queer sudden leaps ; the mice and 

 lemmings darted under the stones, bristling and 

 squealing: it seemed such a summer land! So 

 different can two impressions be. But it was not this 

 short summer visit of mine in 1902 that gave me my 

 real impression of Labrador. I rather think of the 

 autumn of 1903, when I came back to the land to 

 make my home at Okak, and to plant a hospital there 

 among the Eskimos. 



I remember the tension with which we waited for 

 the cry of " Land ! " and I remember with what a 

 mighty roar the steward woke me up, and how I 

 rolled over with a jerk to look through the port- 

 hole: 



And so I saw again the bare black rocks of 



j Labrador, probably two or three miles away, but 



seeming no more than a stone-throw. It looked 



a poor bleak place, but any sort of land was welcome 



47 



