a damp forest. Dry forests are eaten up by
these wide-spreading fires, which have already
turned immense tracts of the Labrador peninsula
into an uninhabitable wilderness.

When Mr. Davies, in 1840, was exploring
a river by Esquimaux Bay, and had been out
ten days without meeting Indians, he ordered
the usual smoke signal of the country to be
made on a neighbouring hill, that any Indians
who were near might see it and come to him.
He encamped, and was sitting at his tent door,
enjoying a cool breeze which had just sprung
up, when he was startled by a noise like thunder,
and the frantic shouts of his men. The fire
was upon them. If their camp had not been on
a spot of green wood they would not have had
even the few minutes that barely sufficed for
escape at the top of their speed. Before they
were half across the river, the whole mountain
was a mountain of fire, and that fire, spreading
for weeks, laid waste hundreds of square
miles of land.

The burning of a spruce birch forest at night
is like a gigantic display of fireworks. A spruce-tree
flashes at once into flame from top to
bottom with a crackling hissing roar, with
quick loud snaps and a splendid red light. The
birch-trees burn with steady flame, pouring up
into the sky huge clouds of smoke that cover
the flaming forest, and reflect from it a lurid
light, into which every sharp gust of wind sends
up a great column of sparks in spiral eddies.
Ten, twenty, fifty, trees at a time shoot up their
twisting flame. The fire subsides. And then
from other trees, another outburst makes the
rocks and mountains glow: while the disturbed
wild-fowl fly in wide circles overhead, and fly
down like moths into the flame, or, when
suffocated, drop straight into it, like stones.

These are not lively considerations for the
settler, who will have to change all this; and
it must grieve the heart of a microscopist to
hear of this great waste of Canada balsam.
Canada balsam's virtues are familiar to the
Indian. Does a man, when woodcutting, chop
into his foot with an axe; his surgeon is the
nearest balsam spruce. He holds the lips of
the wound firmly together, the sticky balsam is
fetched and spread over the cut as glue, bleeding
is stopped at once, and in three days the cut
is well. These Indians also doctor themselves
with vapour-baths, and use the root of the blue iris,
or a decoction of the red willow, as a purgative.
Other medicines are the roots of rushes or of the
white water-lily, and when these fail, resort is
always to be had to charms. His implicit faith in
dreams leads the poor Indian of the Labrador
peninsula to the commission sometimes of great
crimes, in the religious effort to do what he
dreamed he did. But happily the missionaries
have corrected much of this old superstition.
Conceive the state of any populous country in
which it should be every man's care to act out
his dreams, and realise by day the senseless
visions of the night. What a terror to society
would the man addicted much to nightmare, be!

A remarkable feature in Labrador, is the
immense development of lichens on the rocky
soil. Instead of the thin "time stain" on stone
or wood, familiar to us in England, there is the
caribou or reindeer moss: a lichen, covering
large tracts of ground with a growth two feet
thick, on which the reindeer feed. Elastic in
moist weather; in dry weather, as the fires
testify, grown tindery; it breaks under the
tread, and shows every footprint in the track of
man or deer. Next in importance to this
lichen is the "tripe de roche," another lichen
growing throughout all the cold parts of North
America on trunks of trees and gneiss rocks.
This was the sole food of some of our great
Arctic heroes, in their days of deadly peril. But,
steeped in a weak solution of carbonate of soda
(which they had not), washed and boiled, yields a
jelly which becomes very palatable, when it can
be flavoured with wine or lemon. Recent
development of lichen dyes may make, hereafter,
even the lichens of Labrador a source of wealth.

But the chief source of wealth is, at present,
the cod-fishery, which is most active in June,
July, and August. All the cod taken before
September is salted and dried for exportation.
What is taken from September to the close of
the fishing season, is only salted and packed in
barrels for the markets of Quebec and Montreal.

Our old gentleman by the fire has pricked up
his ears at the name of codfish. But he has done
with codfish for to-day, and goes to sleep again.
What little he may have heard of Labrador will
not induce him to go out. Nor is it likely that
many of the race of active men will care to go so
far north, although the ground is really almost
unoccupied.

TOO HARD UPON MY AUNT.

AT five o'clock on the evening of the 31st of
December, 1849, Mr. Twinch, of Grosvenor-street,
rushed into his dining-room with a packet in his
hand, sat down at a little Davenport writingtable
in the window, and scribbled off the following
letter:

"My dear Madam,—I am delighted to say that
I have been able to keep my word, and herewith
send you what you require. With best
compliments, I am,
"Faithfully yours,
"PAYNHAM TWINCH."

This note he folded round the packet, placed
both in a stout envelope, which he addressed
"Miss L. Pemberton, The Grove, Heavitree, near
Exeter;" carried the packet to a neighbouring
receiving-office, caused it to be duly registered,
and with the receipt in his pocket returned home.

Miss Letitia Pemberton was my father's
youngest sister, a maiden lady of middle-age,
kind, amiable, and accomplished, whom everybody
liked for her good temper, and whom many
of us younger ones regarded with deep interest
on account of what we were pleased to term
"her romance." For when Aunt Letitia was a
girl she was very pretty, and was a county