e this waif
of humanity walked in the circle of an unconquerable strangeness.

He came on board,--another with him; for their hut was near by.
Canadian French they proved to be; could tatter English a little; and
with the passage of speech the flow of sympathy began, and we felt them
to be human. Through the Word the worlds were made!

A wilderness of desert islands lies at this point along the coast,
extending out, I judged, not less than fifteen miles. Excepting Little
Mecatina, which is a number of miles in length, and must be some fifteen
hundred feet high, they are not very considerable either in area or
elevation,--from five to five hundred acres in extent, and from thirty
to two hundred feet in height. They are swardless and treeless, though
in two places I found a few blades of coarse, tawny-green grass; and
patches of sombre shrubbery, two and a half feet high, were not wanting.
Little lichen grows on the rock, though in the depressions and on many
of the slopes grows, or at least exists, a boggy greenish-gray moss,
over which it breaks your knees--if, indeed, your spine do not choose to
monopolize that enjoyment--to travel long. The rock is pale granite,
disposed in layers, which vary from two to ten or twelve feet in
thickness. These incline at an angle of from ten to twenty degrees,
giving to the islands, as a predominant characteristic, a regular slope
on one side and a cliff-like aspect on the other; though not a few are
bent up in the middle, perhaps exhibiting there some sharp ridge or
vertical wall, while from this they decline to either side.

As beheld on the day of our arrival, this scenery was of an incomparable
desolation. Above was the coldest gray sky I remember to have seen; the
sea lay all in pallid, deathly gray beneath; islands in all shades of
grimmer and grimmest gray checkered it; vast drifts of gray old snow
filled the deeper hollows; and a heartless atmosphere pushed in the
sense of this grayness to the very marrow. It was as if all the ruddy
and verdurous juices had died in the veins of the world, and from core
to surface only gray remained. To credit fully the impression of the
scene, one would say that Existence was dead, and that we stood looking
on its corpse, which even in death could never decay. Eternal
Desolation,--Labrador!

But extremes meet.

THE PROCESS OF SCULPTURE.

I have heard so much, lately, about artists who do not do their own
work, that I feel dispose