g-shore; and I see as far as most men. But once on this very
voyage, during a storm, I had occasion to be convinced that nautical
optics will assert their advantage. Land was pointed out; it had been
some time seen, and we were avoiding it, the weather being thick and our
position uncertain. I did my best to descry it, ready to quarrel with my
eyes for not doing so, and a little annoyed to find myself but a
landsman after all. But see it I couldn't. I did indeed, after a while,
make out to fancy that I perceived an infinitesimal densening of the
mist there; but the illusion was one difficult to sustain.

At four o'clock in the afternoon we cast anchor in Sleupe Harbor, named
for one Admiral Sleupe, of whom I know just this, that a harbor in
Labrador, Lat. 51 deg., is named for him. This region, however, is named
generally from Little Mecatina Island, which lies about six miles to the
southwest, considerable in size, and a most wild-looking land, tossed,
tumbled, twisted, and contorted in every conceivable and inconceivable
way. The harbor, too, a snug little hole between islands, was worthy of
Labrador. Its shores were all of gray, unbroken rock, not rising in
cliffs, but sloping to the sea, and dipping under it in regular decline,
like a shore of sand; while not a tree, not a shrub, not a grass-blade,
was to be seen. I never beheld a scene so bleak, bare, and hard. Nor did
I ever see a shore that seemed so completely "master of the situation."
The mightiest cliff confesses the power which it resists. Grand,
enduring, awful, it may be; but many a scar on its face and many a
fragment at its feet tells of what it endures. But this scarless gray
rock, thrusting its hand in a matter-of-course way under the sea, and
seeming to hold it as in a cup, suggested a quality so comfortably
immitigable that one's eyes grew cold in looking at it.

Suddenly, "I see an inhabitant!" cries one.

Yes, there he was, moving over the rock. Can you imagine how far away
and foreign he looked? The gray granite beneath him, the gray cloud
above him, seemed nearer akin. Instinctively, one thought of hastening
to a book of natural history for some description of the creature. Then
came the counter-thought, "This is a man!" And the attempt to realize
that fact put him yet farther, put him infinitely away. It was like
rebounding from a wall. No form is so foreign as the human, if a bar be
placed to the sympathy of him who regards it; and for the tim