VISIT TO THE SOUTH COAST OUTPORTS 139 



satisfaction on the noble forty-pointer that adorns his walls 

 when he knows that somewhere up in the sheltered "leads" 

 of the Gander there are one or two fifty-pointers cleaning 

 their horns. It is just the weird imaginings which poor 

 human nature invents and sets us up some fetish that causes 

 us to strive after the seemingly unattainable. Still it 

 prompts us to pack up and go, and we obey. 



On the other hand, my desire to revisit Newfoundland 

 was not altogether connected with the acquisition of the fifty- 

 pointer. A great part of the interior was, and is still, un- 

 mapped and unexplored, and I thought that I might add a 

 little to our knowledge of this, the oldest of our Colonies, by 

 surveying some new ground, as well as adding to that which 

 had been so well mapped by Mr. Howley and Alexander 

 Murray. There was work to be done, and this lent an 

 additional charm to the pleasures of Nature and Sport. There 

 was too, in the back of my mind, a feeling that on the last 

 visit I had not accomplished all I had set out to do. I had 

 intended to cross Newfoundland if possible, and had stuck in 

 the middle, partly on account of the drought, and partly on 

 account of the number of heads which had fallen to my rifle. 

 The latter would have been impossible to transport to the Bale 

 d'Est River, so I had given up the attempt for the year. 



Before starting a fresh expedition into the interior, how- 

 ever, there was other work to do. For five years I had 

 been grinding away at a large work on " The Mammals of 

 Great Britain and Ireland." It was a book which seemed at 

 the time almost beyond my strength, owing to the quantity 

 of material in the way of first-hand knowledge and illustra- 

 tion which I had to supply, to say nothing of the outdoor 

 work and the books I had to consult. It was necessary to 

 see, study, hunt, and draw all the British species, including 



