ON THE LABRADOR. 69 



velvet from their horns among the branches had done 

 so at least a couple of years before, as not only were the 

 trees long dead, but their fellows had grown up and 

 overtopped them. Yet even if the country lacked 

 what we most wished to find, it possessed a singular, 

 if harsh, charm of its own. One spot particularly I 

 used to love to visit, whether alone or in Jack's com- 

 pany. Tliis was a little lake which lay some two miles 

 to the north-west of our camp. Surrounded by trees 

 and seemingly of great depth, it presented the appear- 

 ance of an unfathomable pit sunk into the roots of the 

 hills. The inevitable diver and her brood called cease- 

 lessly upon its waters, bringing back to memory the 

 beautiful and poetic words of Saltatha, the Yellowknife 

 Indian, " You say the Kingdom of Heaven is good, my 

 father ; but tell me, is it better than the land of the 

 musk-ox in summer, when the lakes are sometimes 

 misty and sometimes blue, and the loons cry often? 

 That is good, my father, and if Heaven is better, I 

 shall be willing to dwell there until I am very, very 

 old." Besides the loons two ospreys haunted the little 

 lake, sometimes fishing in the shallow stream which fed 

 it, sometimes winging their way over it and out into 

 the blue distance towards the sea. 



But here Indians, poetical or otherwise, rarely come, 

 their hunting-ground being hundreds of miles away in 

 the neighbourhood of the George River. Sometimes 

 in birch-bark canoes they travel down out of the 

 interior to do their yearly trade at the Hudson's Bay 

 posts of Davis Inlet and North-West River. Then, 

 having bartered their furs, there follows a few days' 

 lounging about the store. The Mountaineers, or 

 Montagnais, are no longer always the picturesque figures 



