while La Salle wore a heavy shooting-coat of white mole-skin, seal-skin
boots reaching to the knee, and armed with "crampets," or small iron
spikes, to prevent slipping, while a white cover slipped over his
Astrachan cap, completed his _outre_ costume. Kennedy, however, outshone
all others in the strangeness of his shooting apparel. Huge "arctics"
were strapped on his feet, from which seemed to spring, as from massive
roots, his small, thin form, clad in a scanty _robe de chambre_ of
cotton flannel, surmounted by a broad sou'wester, carefully covered by a
voluminous white pocket handkerchief. The general effect was that of a
gigantic mushroom carrying a heavy gun, and wearing a huge pair of blue
goggles.

La Salle alone of the four carried a huge single gun of number six
gauge, and carrying a quarter of a pound of heavy shot to tremendous
distances. The others used heavy muzzle-loading double-barrels. A brisk
walk of fifteen minutes brought them to the extremity of the island, and
from a low promontory they saw before them the Bay, and the East Bar,
the scene of their future labors.

Below them the Bar, marked by a low ridge, rising above the level of the
lower shallows,--for the tide was at ebb,--trended away nearly a league
into the spacious bay, covered everywhere with ice, level, smooth, and
glittering in the rising sun, save where, here and there, a huge white
hummock or lofty pinnacle, the fragments of some disintegrated berg,
drifted from Greenland or Labrador, rose along the Bar, where the early
winter gales had stranded them. Leaping down upon the ice-foot, the
party hastened to their respective stands, nearly a mile out on the
Bar--Davies being some four hundred yards from that of La Salle.

The "stand" of the former was a water-tight box of pine, painted white,
and about six feet square by four deep, which was quickly sunk into the
snow-covered ice to about half its depth; the snow and ice removed by
the shovel, being afterwards piled against the sides, beaten hard and
smooth, and finally cemented by the use of water, which in a few moments
froze the whole into the semblance of one of the thousands of hummocks,
which marked the presence of crusted snow-drifts on the level ice.

La Salle, however, had provided better for comfort and the vicissitudes
of sea-fowl shooting; occupying a broad, flat-bottomed boat, furnished
with steel-shod runners, and "half-decked" fore-and-aft, further
defended from the sea an