CHAPTER IV. 



A FALL HUNTING TRIP IN NEWFOUNDLAND. 



T STARTED for my first trip in Newfoundland on the 

 1 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 Vir- 

 ginia 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 estu- 

 ary which forms the roadstead. Often drenched in sea 

 mists, sometimes blurred with rain, yet on a blue Septem- 

 ber 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 busi- 

 ness 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 can foretell 



