f the
atmosphere within is less so. These are a few of the minor
discomforts of travel to a mission station; the rest can be better
imagined than described. If, to the Moslem, to be slain in battle
signifies an immediate entrance into the pleasures of Paradise, what
should be the reward of those who suffer the vagaries of this northern
ocean, and endure to the end?

[Illustration: SAD SEASICK SOULS STREWN AROUND]

My trunk is lost. In the excitement of carpentering incidental to the
cloudburst, the crew of the train omitted to drop it off at
Come-by-Chance. I am informed that it has returned across the country
to St. John's. If I had not already been travelling for a fortnight,
or if Heaven had endowed me with fewer inches so that my clothing were
not so exclusively my own, the problem of the interim till the next
boat would be simpler.

I have had my first, and I may add my last, experience of "brewis," an
indeterminate concoction much in favour as an article of diet on this
coast. The dish consists of hard bread (ship's biscuit) and codfish
boiled together in a copious basis of what I took to be sea-water. "On
the surface of the waters" float partially disintegrated chunks of fat
salt pork. I am not finicking. I could face any one of these articles
of diet alone; but in combination, boiled, and served up lukewarm in a
soup plate for breakfast, in the hot cabin of a violently rolling
little steamer, they take more than my slender stock of philosophy to
cope with. Yet they save the delicacy for the Holy Sabbath. The only
justification of this policy that I can see is that, being a day of
rest, their stomachs can turn undivided and dogged attention to the
process of digestion.

Did I say "day of rest"? The phrase is utterly inadequate. These
people are the strictest of Sabbatarians. The Puritan fathers, whom we
now look back upon with a shivery thankfulness that our lot did not
fall among them, would, and perhaps do, regard them as kindred
spirits. But they are earnest Christians, with a truly uncomplaining
selflessness of life.

By some twist of my brain that reminds me of a story told me the other
day which brings an old legend very prettily to this country. It is
said that when Joseph of Arimathea was hounded from place to place by
the Jews, he fled to England taking the Grail with him. The spot where
he settled he called Avalon. When Lord Baltimore, a devout Catholic,
was given a huge tract of land in the so