APPROACHING THE COAST. 83 



on Mount Washington luxuriates with stunted growths 

 of bushy firs and birches. So, nearly all the shells, 

 worms, and creeping things are the same in kind and 

 number as those that Otho Fabricius wrote of in his 

 " Fauna Gronlandica," during his dreary life in southern 

 Greenland one hundred years ago. 



As we approach land no capes run out to greet us, or 

 sheltered harbor opens its arms to embrace. An unin- 

 terrupted line of coast confronts the gulf. In one place 

 alone is the intense monotony of the outline relieved by 

 the Hills of Bradore, where the coast sweeps round fif- 

 teen miles to the eastward, and the Strait widens out. 



It is a charming morning, the sun up but an hour, and 

 just breeze enough to move us over the placid sea. 

 Flocks of grave, enormous-hook-billed puffins sweep by 

 us in squadrons of fifties and hundreds, or flocks of eider- 

 ducks fly swiftly out from the land. Coming up nearer 

 to this strange coast, the line breaks here and there ; a 

 few rocks and islands start out from the shore. We pass 

 by schools of two-masted fishing-boats, with two men 

 apiece hooking codfish ; we hail the fellows, but they 

 are too busy to look up. Things look a little more live- 

 ly ; more islands appear, channels wind through them, 

 choked with fleets of fishing-smacks. But the wind 

 leaves us, so we put out a boat and are towed through 

 these narrow passages, whose walls of rock rise on each 

 side higher than the masts of our schooner, though not 

 very precipitously, for all has been worn down and sub- 

 dued by water. So we move along, as if on a smooth- 

 flowing, deep, narrow river, or a Norwegian fiord ; now 

 we round a point, and can almost jump ashore ; then a 

 bend in the channel takes us over to the other side ; now 



