You have been grossly imposed upon in a way
we can understand. Many hundreds of gentlemen
have been so deceived before, and many
hundreds will doubtless be so deceived again.
Good morning."

FOR LABRADOR, SIR?

A CANADIAN professor wishes to know when
we mean to establish settlements in Labrador?
In this winter weather the round Briton who
likes to nurse the fire, and go to sleep after his
dinner within easy reach of the coal-scuttle, is
to be tempted only by some great attraction far
away from the settlement of his choice, in an
arm-chair. He will not trouble himself to open
his eyes when he is told that the fisheries on
the Atlantic coast of Labrador are worth a
million sterling, yet that, since the destruction
of the town of Brest at the gulf entrance of
the Straits of Belleisle which separate the
south of Labrador from the north of Newfoundland,
there has been no settlement of
consequence. Yet a quarter of a million would at
once be saved if there were curing establishments
upon the coast. He wants no more
fish. He has dined. What is it to him that
there is ground waiting for civilised man in
the great valleys of the interior, with fuel and
building timber in abundance, and a soil and
climate capable of yielding green peas and
potatoes? He only knows that it is pleasant,
while he roasts his slippers, to think of that
great north-easter-land upon the boundary of
Canada, chill Labrador in the far north, with
its coast facing the Greenland sea, as a place to
which it is heroic in the Moravian missionaries
to go forth and settle, with their usual preference
for "Greenland's icy mountains" over
"India's coral strand." Every man to his
taste, and he can understand that sort of taste
a little; for he himself can't dine without ice,
and has a weakness for ice-pudding.

While the British fire-worshipper snores in
his easy-chair, we will accept the invitation of
our friend MR. HENRY YOULE HIND, Professor
of Chemistry and Geology in the University of
Toronto, to run over and look at the interior of
the Labrador peninsula. Any fire-worshipper
may do the same, by help of Mr. Hind's couple
of volumes.

We may go, if we will, by the Grand Trunk
Railway of Canada, destined hereafter to carry
fish of the Labrador coast into the great cities
of the west (when North and South have come to
the end of their fighting wind), and the present
terminus of the Grand Trunk at Rivière de Loup
has been connected with the Bay of Chaleurs.
Wishing all future success to the Grand Trunk,
which is not a money-chest at present—as some
people know—with a hop and a skip, we are in
Labrador, together with our canoes, portable
tents, flannel-shirts, guides, smoked bacon,
biscuit, and all other necessaries for the exploration
we intend to make.

Each canoe is no bigger than one man can
carry. It will carry in its turn three men, and
five hundred-weight of provisions. In Labrador,
sometimes the boats carry the men; at other
times, down the hills by the side of the worst
rapids, the men carry the boats. The native
Indians are the Montagnais and the Nasquapees
(upright-standers); hardy fellows in the
interior, who, when they get down to the coast
and stop there a few months, eating seals and fish,
become rheumatic, consumptive, and by physical
weakness indolent. Up stream, paddle Professor
Hind; and Mr. William Hind his brother, who
carries the portfolio, pencil, and paint-box; and
Messrs. J. F. Gaudet, and Edward Caley,
Government Surveyors.

Except a few settlements on the St. Lawrence
and North Atlantic coasts, and some widely
separated ports of the Hudson's Bay Company,
all Labrador—a region as large as France will
be, when she has annexed not only Prussia but
the British Islands too—is peopled only by a few
wandering bands of Montagnais and Nasquapee,
Mistassini and Swampy Creek Indians, and by
wandering Esquimaux upon the northern coasts.
The part of this great region drained by the
St. Lawrence, is said to belong to Canada. The
middle part, supposed to be drained by rivers
flowing into the Atlantic, where it is called the
Greenland Sea, is said to be under the
jurisdiction of Newfoundland. And the part of
which the rivers flow to Hudson's Bay, is called
the East Main. But these regions have
undefined boundaries, for when Professor Hind set
out upon his exploration there was no true
knowledge of the interior.

The river Moesie or Mis-te-shipu (the same
as Mississippi, or Great River) flows into the
Gulf of St. Lawrence about eighteen miles east
of the Bay of Seven Islands. It is the great river
of the Montagnais Indians, and seven of them
having made a clever chart of its course, the first
work of exploration was to test the value of this.
Good-tempered Louis—a Montagnais Indian,
who is a bad shot, but understands a canoe—is
chief steersman; and his wife, a very handsome
squaw, stands by at his departure, though she
will have nothing to do with him, will not look
at him, and is ashamed of him, because he cannot
hunt. The priest comes only for a few days
once a year, and when he last came she agreed
in a hurry to be married to him. Two days
after the wedding, they went out, Indian fashion,
to hunt seals together; the wife steering, the
husband ready with his gun, as usual. His
first shot was a very bad one; and without a
word she paddled to shore, jumped out, and ran
back to her father's lodge. He begged for
another chance, and she went out with him
another day. He missed the first seal. She
paddled him to a second; he missed that.
Then she looked at him in a way that made him
very nervous, said nothing, and paddled him
close up to a third. He was flurried, and
missed again. Whereupon she again paddled
ashore, left him, and has given him the "cut
direct" ever since. Nevertheless, Louis, with a
lucrative job in prospect, asks for fifteen dollars