trap;--and with every softer quality of rock there was an
improvement in vegetation. This was particularly observable at L'Anse du
Loup, where there is a red sandstone formation extending some miles
along the sea and a mile or two inland. Here we seemed suddenly
transported to a Southern climate, so soft was the scenery, so green the
surface. The effect was enhanced by the aspect of the sandstone cliff,
which, in alternating horizontal shades of red, fronts the sea, with a
vertical height of three hundred feet for the whole extent of this
formation,--so ruddy and glowing under the sunshine, as we sailed past,
that one felt warmed by the sight, But a little farther back rose the
same old hard-hearted hills, cold, broken, and bare as ever.

But the difference in soil does not wholly explain the difference in
vegetation. In the mission-garden at Caribou Island next to nothing will
grow; in the garden at Hopedale, four degrees farther north, though the
rock here is very hard, I found half an acre of potatoes in blossom, the
tops about six inches high, together with beets, carrots, cabbages,
onions, nice currant-bushes, and rhubarb growing luxuriantly. These are
all started under cover, and are not set out in the garden until toward
the end of June, and a great deal of Esquimaux labor must go to their
production; yet it is doubtful whether the same pains would bring about
the same result at the Caribou station.

It is the sea that dooms Labrador, and the relation of the coast to this
does much to determine its fertility, or rather its barrenness. Half way
across the ocean, in latitude 54 deg., Captain Linklater found the
temperature of the water 54 deg., Fahrenheit; near the Labrador coast, in
the same latitude, the temperature was but 34 deg., two degrees only above
the freezing point! It is in facts like this that one gets a key to the
climate not only of Labrador, but of Eastern North America. Out of the
eternal ice of the North the current presses down along the coast,
chilling land and air wherever it touches. Where the coast retreats
somewhat, and is well barricaded with islands, the rigor of the climate
is mitigated; where it lies fully exposed to the Arctic current, even
though much farther south, the life is utterly chilled out of it. Now
Hopedale lies behind a rampart of islands twenty miles deep; while the
portion of the Arctic current which splits off at the head of
Newfoundland, and pushes down through the stra