SUMMEK IN LABRADOR. 269 



"June 30. I have drawn three birds to-day since eight 

 o'clock. Thermometer 50°. 



" July 1. The thermometer 48°, and the weather so cold that 

 it has been painful for me to draw, but I worked all day. 



" July 2. A beautiful day for Labrador. Went ashore and 

 killed nothing, but was pleased with what I saw. The country 

 is so grandly wild and desolate, that I am charmed by its 

 wonderful dreariness. Its mossy gray-clad rocks, heaped and 

 thrown together in huge masses, hanging on smaller ones, as if 

 about to roll down from their insecure resting-places into the sea 

 below them. Bays without end, sprinkled with thousands of 

 rocky inlets of all sizes, shapes, and appearances, and wild birds 

 everywhere, was the scene presented before me. Besides this 

 there was a peculiar cast of the uncertain sky, butterflies flitting 

 over snow-banks, and probing unfolding dwarf flowerets of many 

 hues pushing out their tender stems through the thick beds of 

 moss which everywhere cover the granite rock. Then there is 

 the morass, wherein you plunge up to your knees, or the walking 

 over the stubborn, dwarfish shrubbery, whereby one treads 

 down the forests of Labrador ; and the unexpected bunting or 

 Sylvia which perchance, and indeed as if by chance alone, you, 

 now and then see flying before you, or hear singing from the 

 ground creeping plant. The beautiful fresh-water lakes, de- 

 posited on the rugged crests of greatly elevated islands, wherein 

 the red and black divers swim as proudly as swans do in other 

 latitudes; and wherein the fish appear to have been cast as 

 strayed beings from the surplus food of the sea. All, all is 

 wonderfully wild and grand, ay, terrific. And yet how beauti- 

 ful it is now, when your eye sees the wild bee, moving from one 

 flower to another in search of food, which doubtless is as sweet 

 to her as the essence of the orange and magnolia is to her 

 more favoured sister in Louisiana. The little ring-plover 

 rearing its delicate and tender young ; the eider duck swimming 

 man-of-war-like amid her floating brood, like the guard-ship of 

 a most valuable convoy ; the white-crowned bunting's sonorous 

 note reaching your ears ever and anon ; the crowds of sea-birds 

 in search of places wherein to repose or to feed. I say how 

 beautiful all this, in this wonderful rocky desert at this season, 

 the beginning of July, compared with the horrid blasts of winter 



