LABRADOR JOURNAL 123 



He immediately sat down by the tire side, placed 

 both his hands on his knees, leaned his head for- 

 ward, tixed his eyes on the ground in a stupid 

 stare; and continued in that posture for a con- 

 siderable time. At length, tossing up his head, 

 and fixing his eyes on the cieling, he broke out 

 in the following soliloquy; ''Oh! I am tired; 

 here are too mam^ houses; too much smoke; too 

 many people; Labrador is very good; seals are 

 plentiful there; I wish I was back again." By 

 which I could plainly perceive, that the multi- 

 plicity, and variety of objects had confounded his 

 ideas; which were too much confined to compre- 

 hend any thing but the inconveniences that he had 

 met with. And indeed, the longer they continued 

 in England, the more was I convinced of the truth 

 of that opinion; for their admiration increased in 

 proportion, as their ideas expanded; till at length 

 they began more clearly to comj^rehend the use^ 

 beauty, and mechanism of what they saw ; though 

 the greater part of these were as totally lost upon 

 them, as they would have been upon one of the 

 brute creation. 



Although they had often passed St. Paul's with- 

 out betraying any great astonishment, or at least 

 not so much as all Europeans do at the first sight 

 of one of those stupendous islands of ice, w^hich 

 are daily to be seen near the east coast of their 

 owTi country, yet when T t(wk thorn to the top of 

 it, and convinced them that i1 was ])nilt by the 

 hands of men (a circumsiancj^ wliich had not en- 

 tered their heads before, for they had supposed 



