we were stationed there, be it understood) very pleasant.  The island is a hilly one, covered with pine forests.  Where the woods fail, there are lakes and rivers, admirably clear, and swarming with salmon and trout.  There was plenty of game, and all this in the midst of the uninhabited region where every one can enjoy the completest liberty, with no limits but those imposed by his own tastes and endurance.  If there were no drawback to all these advantages, Newfoundland in the summer-time would be a paradise, and there is no such thing as that upon our globe.  The drawback is the flies, little black ones, called the “black fly,” the pest of all northern countries, against which one is quite defenceless.  They get in everywhere; no preservative stops them; no ointment nor any daubing repels them.  During a hunting excursion I made to the Isle of Groix, so christened by some native of L’Orient, which is about eight miles off Le Croc, I saw some of my comrades with their heads swelled up like a hydrocephalous patient’s, so that their eyes had disappeared, half mad with pain from the stings of that infernal fly, and one of our sailor servants lay on the ground, refusing to move, and begging us with tears to put a rifle to his head and end his agony.

This Isle of Groix swarmed with creatures that had come over the ice from the mainland in the winter season.  Its steep edges, covered with an impenetrable arborescent growth, enclosed a great treeless plateau, a “lande.”  We used to get on to this lande by walking up the bed of a rivulet, and once on it we had perfect massacres of winged game, especially of that sort of gray grouse called ptarmigan by the English.  It was these birds’ pairing season.  They never flew away, and when we killed one the other would ruffle up its feathers in a fury and fly pecking at our legs.  The wooded sides of the island must have been full of reindeer, to judge by the quantities of tracks to be seen on every side.  If we had had one or two hounds to send into the thickets we might have made hecatombs of them.

From Le Croc I went round all our neighbouring fishing stations—­Saint Julien, the Baie Rouge, &c.  Cod were extraordinarily numerous that year.  One haul of the seine at the Baie Rouge brought in eighty-four thousand cod-fish in one day.  It was the golden age of the fishery.  Now the fish have deserted the eastern coast of Newfoundland.  Our fishermen have to take their boats and anchor on the big bank, and there they stay for months, tossed about by every tempest.  They go out line-fishing in small boats, which are frequently lost in the fog and never heard of again.  Often, too, the fishing vessel herself is cut in two, in fog or darkness, by some transatlantic liner steaming seventeen knots an hour, which is out of sight in a few seconds, while the unlucky boat founders with all hands.  A hard and a risky life our bank fishermen lead.  But they come back men, and well-seasoned men too!