Doctor Luke of the Labrador | Page 2

yet white with drift-ice--the schooners of the Newfoundland fleet, bound north to the fishing, often came scurrying into our harbour for shelter. And when the skippers, still dripping the spray of the gale from beard and sou'wester, came ashore for a yarn and an hospitable glass with my father, the trader, many a tale of wind and wreck and far-away harbours I heard, while we sat by the roaring stove in my father's little shop: such as those which began, "Well, 'twas the wonderfullest gale o' wind you ever seed--snowin' an' blowin', with the sea in mountains, an' it as black as a wolf's throat--an' we was somewheres off Cape Mugford. She were drivin' with a nor'east gale, with the shore somewheres handy t' le'ward. But, look! nar a one of us knowed where she were to, 'less 'twas in the thick o' the Black Heart Reefs...." Stout, hearty fellows they were who told yarns like these--thick and broad about the chest and lanky below, long-armed, hammer-fisted, with frowsy beards, bushy brows, and clear blue eyes, which were fearless and quick to look.
"'Tis a fine harbour you got here, Skipper David Roth," they would say to my father, when it came time to go aboard, "an' here, zur," raising the last glass, "is t' the rocks that make it!"
"T' the schooners they shelter!" my father would respond.
When the weather turned civil, I would away to the summit of the Watchman--a scamper and a mad climb--to watch the doughty little schooners on their way. And it made my heart swell and flutter to see them dig their noses into the swelling seas--to watch them heel and leap and make the white dust fly--to feel the rush of the wet wind that drove them--to know that the grey path of a thousand miles was every league of the way beset with peril. Brave craft! Stout hearts to sail them! It thrilled me to watch them beating up the suddy coast, lying low and black in the north, and through the leaden, ice-strewn seas, with the murky night creeping in from the open. I, too, would be the skipper of a schooner, and sail with the best of them!
"A schooner an' a wet deck for me!" thought I.
And I loved our harbour all the more for that.
* * * * *
Thus, our harbour lay, a still, deep basin, in the shelter of three islands and a cape of the mainland: and we loved it, drear as it was, because we were born there and knew no kinder land; and we boasted it, in all the harbours of the Labrador, because it was a safe place, whatever the gale that blew.

II
The WORLD From The WATCHMAN
The Watchman was the outermost headland of our coast and a landmark from afar--a great gray hill on the point of Good Promise by the Gate; our craft, running in from the Hook-an'-Line grounds off Raven Rock, rounded the Watchman and sped thence through the Gate and past Frothy Point into harbour. It was bold and bare--scoured by the weather--and dripping wet on days when the fog hung thick and low. It fell sharply to the sea by way of a weather-beaten cliff, in whose high fissures the gulls, wary of the hands of the lads of the place, wisely nested; and within the harbour it rose from Trader's Cove, where, snug under a broken cliff, stood our house and the little shop and storehouse and the broad drying-flakes and the wharf and fish-stages of my father's business. From the top there was a far, wide outlook--all sea and rock: along the ragged, treeless coast, north and south, to the haze wherewith, in distances beyond the ken of lads, it melted; and upon the thirty wee white houses of our folk, scattered haphazard about the harbour water, each in its own little cove and each with its own little stage and great flake; and over the barren, swelling rock beyond, to the blue wilderness, lying infinitely far away.
I shuddered when from the Watchman I looked upon the wilderness.
"'Tis a dreadful place," I had heard my father say. "Men starves in there."
This I knew to be true, for, once, I had seen the face of a man who came crawling out.
"The sea is kinder," I thought.
Whether so or not, I was to prove, at least, that the wilderness was cruel.
* * * * *
One blue day, when the furthest places on sea and land lay in a thin, still haze, my mother and I went to the Watchman to romp. There was place there for a merry gambol, place, even, led by a wiser hand, for roaming and childish adventure--and there were silence and sunlit space and sea and distant mists for the weaving of dreams--ay, and, upon rare days, the