270 Life and Nature in Southern Labrador. [ March, 
ing village of Newfoundland, behind which rise steep hills clothed 
with “tucking-bush,” or dwarf spruce and larch. Cape Ray 
pushes boldly into the sea, its precipitous sides of decomposed 
sandstone furrowed by the rains which pour down its scarred 
cheeks, on which still linger banks of the last winter’s snows. 
By the next evening we pass Cape St. Georges. The 4th was 
celebrated in the Gulf of St. Lawrence amid fog and rain. It 
was succeeded by a twenty-four hours’ gale, rather severe for the 
season, which tested the excellent qualities of the Nautilus as a 
sea boat. This being our first storm at sea was enjoyed more 
keenly than similar gales in after years. The sea swept our 
deck, but only a few drops entered the cabin. The experience 
was novel and interesting, fortunately we were not sea sick; the 
long waves sloped up like far-reaching hills; sea birds rode on 
their crests, and the wind, like a swarm of furies, tore through 
our rigging. There were but occasional glimpses from the com- 
panion way of our dark, close cabin, redolent with the stench of 
the bilge water. The storm abated after sunset, and the morning 
‘ of the 6th found us only fifty miles from Caribou island. Toward 
noon the first iceberg was seen; others came into view, some 
stranded, others floating on the sea. 
The evening was a glorious one; after a gorgeous sunset, the 
twilight lasting until after ten o’clock, the moon rose upon berg 
and sea. We were’ in an arctic ocean; creatures born in the 
Greenland seas floated past our vessel, and while becalmed at 
night we fish up from a depth of sixty or seventy fathoms a 
basket starfish (Astrophyton agassizii) large enough to cover the ~ 
bottom of a pail. 
The impressions made on our minds the next day as we ap- 
proached the coast and passed in shore, winding through the 
labyrinth of islands fringing the main land, are ineffaceable. 
That and other days in Southern Labrador are stamped indelibly 
on our mind. It was passing from the temperate zone into the 
life and nature of the arctic regions. There is a .strange com- 
mingling of life-forms in the Straits of Belle Isle. The flora and 
fauna of the boreal regions struggling, as it were, to displace the 
arctic forms established on these shores since the ice period, when 
Labrador was mantled in perennial snow and ice, when the great 
: : auk, the walrus and the narwhal abounded in the waters of the 
- _ Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the Greenland flora, represented by 
