ndiment or sauce to civilization, not for a full
meal. I have not the heroic Thoreau-digestion, and grow thin after a
time on a diet of moss and granite, even when they are served with ice.
Lift the curtain, therefore, and let us look forthwith on your Hopedale.

"Hopedale? Why, here it is,--look!"

Well, I have been doing nothing less for the last half-hour. If looking
could make a village, I should begin to see one. There, to be sure, is
the mission-house, conspicuous enough, quaint and by no means
unpleasing. It is a spacious, substantial, two-story edifice, painted in
two shades of a peculiar red, and looking for all the world as if a
principal house, taken from one of those little German toy-villages
which are in vogue about Christmas, had been enormously magnified, and
shipped to Labrador. There, too, and in similar colors, is the long
chapel, on the centre of whose roof there is a belfry, which looks like
two thirds of immense red egg, drawn up at the top into a spindle, and
this surmounted by a weathercock,--as if some giant had attempted to
blow the egg from beneath, and had only blown out of it this small bird
with a stick to stand on! Ah, yes! and there is the pig-sty,--not in
keeping with the rest, by any means! It must be that they keep a pig
only now and then, and for a short time, and house it any way for that
little while. But no, it is not a piggery; it is not a building at all;
it is some chance heap of rubbish, which will be removed to-morrow.

The mission-station, then, is here; but the village must be elsewhere.
Probably it is on the other side of this point of land on which the
house and chapel are situated; we can see that the water sweeps around
there. That is the case, no doubt; Hopedale is over there. After dinner
we will row around, and have a look at it.

After dinner, however, we decide to go first and pay our respects to the
missionaries. They are entitled to the precedence. We long, moreover, to
take the loving, self-sacrificing men by the hand; while, aside from
their special claims to honor, it will be _so_ pleasant to meet
cultivated human beings once more! They are Germans, but their
head-quarters are at London; they will speak English; and if their
vocabulary prove scanty, we will try to eke it out with bits of German.

We row ashore in our own skiff, land, and--Bless us! what is this now?
To the right of the large, neat, comfortable mission-house is a
wretched, squalid spatter an