aged, Wade and Kit espied a bed of moss in a hollow
between the crags, a portion of which was dry enough for our purpose.
After bringing an armful of the tea-plant, we made a trip to the
moss-patch. What we could all bring at once piled upon the coarse
shrubs made a bed by no means to be despised by--cast-aways.

"I presume there's no need of mounting guard or setting a watch here,"
Donovan said.

"How do we know that some party of Huskies or Indians has not been
watching our movements all day?" Weymouth suggested.

"I don't think it likely," said Raed. "We may all venture to go to
sleep, I guess, and trust to Guard to keep watch for us."

"I don't know about that," Kit remarked, patting the old fellow's
head. "He's eaten so much of our woodpile, that he will be but a
drowsy sentinel, I'm afraid."

The fire was replenished with blubber; and we all lay down on our
mossy beds inside our fresh-smelling tent.

The sun must have been still high in the north-west; but so wild and
dark were the clouds, that it had grown quite dark by nine o'clock.
The damp wind-gusts sighed; the surf swashed drearily on the rocks.
Despite all our efforts to bear up and seem gay, a weight of doubt and
danger rested heavily on our spirits. "Where is 'The Curlew' _now_?"
was the question that would keep constantly recurring, followed by a
still more ominous query, "What would become of us if she should not
return?"

"Isn't there a town out on the Atlantic coast of Labrador, a town or a
village, settled by the Moravian missionaries?" Raed asked suddenly,
after we had been lying there quietly for some minutes.

"Seems to me there is," Kit replied after a moment of reflection.

"There's one indicated on our geography-maps, I'm pretty sure, called
_Nain_, or some such scriptural name. Don't you remember it, Wash?"

I did distinctly; and also another, either above or below it on the
coast, called Hopedale, colonized by missionaries from South
Greenland.

"Those Moravians are very good folks, I've heard," Wade said. "They're
a very pious, Christian people. I have read, too, that they have
succeeded in Christianizing many of the coast Esquimaux."

"Those Huskies must make queer Christians!" exclaimed Donovan.

"How far do you suppose it is out to those towns, Nain, say, from
here, for a guess?" Raed asked a few minutes after.

"I was just thinking of that," said Kit. "Well, I should say four
hundred miles."

"Not less than six hundred