156 A summer's cruise to northern LABRADOR. 



deployed a few skirmishers from the edge of the pack and 

 soon brought the whole floe upon us, Down it came, 

 borne by the wind and the Labrador current, at the rate 

 of three or four miles an hour. It closed in at Cape 

 Bluff to the north of us. We ran before the wind, soon 

 leaving in the distance the twin bergs, with their myr- 

 midons of the floe. On entering the tickle we found 

 ourselves completely surrounded, well-nigh cut off from 

 our harbor, but by dint of tacking and pushing the cakes 

 to one side with our oars, and running over some smaller 

 floes which gnashed and ground harshly on our boat's 

 bottom, we got through just in time to escape being 

 completely shut out. Not so, however, a boat's crew 

 which had hurried out to pull up their salmon -nets, 

 and who did not appear until long after we had boarded 

 our vessel. 



Our box of a harbor was again jammed full of ice, 

 eight vessels riding at their hawsers, all ice-bound. And 

 now looking through the pellucid water between the 

 cakes of ice, our old arctic friends the Mertensia and 

 Clione, welled up from below, seeking the surface, as 

 cold and calm as the ice itself. 



As the sun went down the fog succeeded the ice; but 

 it hung low, leaving" the blue sky above us, screening 

 our craft even from the shore and in part from the 

 neighboring vessel. Before the twilight fell the rays of 

 the sun, then an hour high, passing through the mist 

 gave rise to a "fog -eater," a broad, diffused rainbow, 

 which was dispelled as the moon rose and peered in over 

 the sides of the screen of fog. 



Among the late arrivals was a Newfoundland fishing- 

 smack which had two crews aboard, and with them six 



