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WITH THE TIDE.

I WATCHED him I love going from me
(Ah, would to God I had died);
And I prayed to the great All Father
To stay the turn of the tide.

To stay the ebb; and he hearkened,
And ever the waves rolled on;
Till meadow and garden and hedgerows,
I could see them never a one.

For I knew that my love was dying,
At the turn of the tide he must go,
The soul may not leave its dwelling

Till betwixt the ebb and the flow.

And the people who all flocked inland
They called it a great spring tide;
And I listened, and joined in their sorrow,
But I knew in my heart that I lied !

And my love, as he watched the waters,
Sighed wearily for his rest;

Then I prayed once more to our Father,
For I saw that his will was best.

Did no one stand for justice, no one say
I am for virtue; but the truth betray,
Raising no protest, silently conniving?
Who ever lived true life by such contriv-
ing!

Who has not longed, after some dreadful
day,

For night to drop its curtain on the play, With silent benediction all things shriving?

'Tis not by irony men live; we need

To know who are the mourners, who have tears;

Who would give life for country or for creed,

Not quench his own and others' fire in

sneers.

Ah, God from street to street we some

times go

ENSHRINED.

COME quickly in and close the door,
For none hath entered here before,
The secret chamber set apart
Within the cloister of the heart.

Tread softly! 'Tis the holy place
Where memory meets face to face
A sacred sorrow, felt of yore,
But sleeping now forevermore.

It cannot die; for naught of pain,
Its fleeting vesture doth remain ;
Behold upon the shrouded eye
The seal of immortality!

Love would not wake it, nor efface
Of anguish one abiding trace,

Since e'en the calm of heaven were less,
Untouched of human tenderness.
JOHN B. TABB.

THERE'S one I miss. A little questioning
maid

That held my finger, trotting by my side,
And smiled out of her pleased eyes open

wide,

Wondering and wiser at each word I said.
And I must help her frolics if she played,

And I must feel her trouble if she cried;
My lap was hers past right to be denied ;
She did my bidding, but I more obeyed.

Dearer she is to-day, dearer and more; Closer to me, since sister womanhoods meet;

Yet like poor mothers some long while bereft,

I dwell on inward ways, quaint memories left,

I miss the approaching sound of pit-pat
feet,

The eager baby voice outside my door.
AUGUSTA WEBSTER.

CRADLE-SONG AT TWILIGHT.

THE child not yet is lulled to rest.
Too young a nurse, the slender Night
So laxly holds him to her breast
That throbs with flight.

He plays with her, and will not sleep.
For other playfellows she sighs;

As men in masks, and know not friend An unmaternal fondness keep

from foe.

Her alien eyes.
Saturday Review.

ALICE MEynell.

From The London Quarterly Review.

LABRADOR.1

Dr. Packard gives us a bibliography of one hundred and forty-five different works dealing more or less directly with Labrador, and, in addition, a list of fifty-five works treating wholly or in part of its geology and natural history. Many of these are books of great value, though, necessarily, in not a few instances, they cover similar ground, and deal with the coast and those parts of the peninsula which have been opened up by the servants of the Hudson's Bay Company and the Moravian

rivers are swift and broken by innumerable cataracts; a plague of black TEN centuries have elapsed since, flies, not to speak of mosquitoes, renaccording to the Saga of Erik the Red, ders life intolerable; game is no longer the Norsemen discovered the coast of plentiful; the brief summer is soon Labrador. A party of Vikings sailing followed by a winter the severity of westward to their recently formed which makes travel practically imposcolony in south Greenland, in the rude sible - these are some of the difficuland clumsy craft in which these adven-ties which the explorers of Labrador turous rovers scoured all the seas of have to overcome. the northern world, were driven out of their course by tempest, and sighted a land high and mountainous and bordered by icebergs. This was in 990. Ten years later, Lief, the son of Erik the Red, cast anchor in one of the bays on this wild coast, landed, found the country "full of ice mountains, desolate, and its shores covered with stones," and called it Helluland, the stony land. As the country was good for nothing in the estimation of the Icelandic seaman, he made no attempt to explore or colonize it, but sailed missionaries. Professor Hind presents south in search of more congenial and fruitful lands. After so many centuries, a great part of the interior of Labrador still remains unexplored; a vast, mysterious region of which we know less, perhaps, than of the heart of Africa or Australia, or the shores of Siberia. The obstacles to exploration, and especially to scientific exploration, are enormous. Vast tracks of the country are strewn with massive boulders in chaotic confusion; the great

1 1. The Labrador Coast: A Journal of Two Summer Cruises to that Region. With Notes on its Early Discovery; on the Eskimo; on its Physical Geography, Geology, and Natural History. By Alpheus Spring Packard, M.D., Ph.D. With

Maps and Illustrations. New York: N. D. C

Hodges. London: Kegan Paul & Co.

2. Explorations in the Interior of the Labrador Peninsula, the Country of the Montagnais and Nasquapee Indians. By Henry Y. Hind, M.A., Professor of Chemistry and Geology in the University of Trinity College, Toronto, etc. In two volumes. London: Longmans, Green & Co.

in his volume the results of his exploration of the Moisie River. McLean ventured where no other white man had set foot. The Moravian missionaries have contributed much knowledge concerning the extreme north, where their stations are situated, and science owes them a great debt. Cartwright's graphic portraiture of the Labrador coast, with its people and fauna and fisheries a hundred years ago, is a book which can never be superseded. It is now a very scarce and costly work. Dr. Packard's volume is at once a fascinating narrative of travel and an accurate scientific text-book of the

geology, botany, and zoology of Labrador, incorporating the most recent information. Complete lists are furnished of all classes of creatures mammals, birds, fishes, butterflies, moths, beetles, spiders; of crustaThe book leaves little to be desired as ceans, molluscs, star-fish, and polyps. a journal of travel, and is a most im4. The Ancient and Modern History of the portant contribution to our knowledge [United] Brethren. By David Cranz. London. of the coast and of the country generally.

3. Sixteen Years on the Coast of Labrador. By George Cartwright. In two volumes 4to. Maps, etc. Newark. 1792.

1780.

5. Periodical Accounts relating to Moravian Missions. No. 21. March, 1895. London: 32 Fetter Lane.

The coast is one of stern grandeur.

6. Notes of Twenty-five Years' Service in the During the long winter it is ice-bound,

Hudson's Bay Territories. By John McLean.

the extent of the ice-fields being fifty

ர

thousand square miles. It is fringed | sea-shell where all the glory of inefwith innumerable islands, which form fable rose and purple blend with ivory an almost continuous barrier against and gold-tinted white. When the sun the ocean-swell, and make navigation goes down in a pageant of color and safe for the smaller craft which hug the clear moon rises on sea and berg the mainland. Long fiords intersect and wild coast, the effects are indethe coast, and run far in among the scribably fine. Indeed for glorious hills. Bold red syenite headlands sunsets, for the wonders of mirage and stand perpendicularly out of the sea ice-loom," and rainbow, for the for hundreds of feet. Behind these splendor of the Aurora, we are told, rise lofty terraced mountains with there is no land like this. rounded tops; and far back are peaks, whose sides are draped with clouds, 'cleaving the sky to the height of five or six thousand feet. No trace of green catches the eye, except on the sheltered sides of the fiords; but you see a patch of snow here and there, even in the summer; and, if the mountain be jewelled with great masses of labradorite, as not unfrequently happens, it flashes in the sun with a strange brilliance. Eventide brings with it a sombre beauty, a severity of glory, that is said to fill the beholder with wonder and awe that deepen into sadness.

Icebergs are common on the coast in the early summer. Stupendous masses from one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet in height, white as Carrara marble, stand out of a sea of azure, belmeted and plumed with loveliness. They assume a great variety of shape. Some are huge white chalk-cliffs, others are floating pyramids, some resemble great cathedrals, domed and minareted, others stately warships tumbling and rolling in surf, and others again are gigantic sculptures of all imaginable forms. And the color is as various as the shape. Superb alabaster, delicate blue, pale emerald, burnished silver on the sunny side, and in the shadow "soft as satin and changeable as costliest silk; the white, the dove-color, the green playing into each other with the subtlety and fleetness of an Aurora." Here, as the deep swell rushes up and breaks on the ledges of the berg, the water grows luminous and is barred and flecked with snow; there, as we look into wave-worn caverns that pierce its sides, we seem to be peering into the mouth of a huge

Navigation is difficult and slow on account of the icepack filling the bays and channels running among the islands; but harbors are numerous, and the scientist may frequently land and pursue his studies of the flora and fauna, look into the homes of the people, observe their habits, gather information about the fisheries, and interview stray Indians as to the nature of the country that lies back from the coast, with its lakes and mountains. He can dredge in the bays for shells and marine insects, can note the rare sea-anemones and sea-pinks beautiful as any carnations, can study remark able raised beaches and more remarkable terraced mountains.

The flora of Labrador is of special interest from the fact that Labrador is probably the oldest land surface on the globe producing a flora. In the north and east, the flora is Arctic, the remnants of the glacial flora that at one time spread over a great part of North America, when the reign of perpetual winter was supreme. This flora was pushed northward and eastward to the seacoast by the advance of the temperate forms as the glacial epoch came to a close. The flora of south Labrador is a commingling of Arctic with many Subarctic plants. The eastern valleys are filled with dense forests of dwarf alders, miniature trees the trunks of which do not exceed three or four feet in height. With these are interspersed here and there poplar, spruce, or mountain-ash, from ten to eighteen feet long. The dwarf willow, about six inches high, and several other species of willow, including Saliz herbacea and Salix walsamifera, grow and offer their honey-bearing flowers

to the bees. In the glades of these | filled with snow, and their dark lips of Liliputian forests deep mosses flourish, rock smile with bright flowers. Low the curlew-berry and dwarf cranberry sedges of several kinds are in blossom; ripen their fruit; the rocks are painted and, hidden in the greenery, are blue with the gayest of lichens, and sweet and white violets. We have referred Alpine plants display their rich blooms. chiefly to summer in the south. The transient summer lasts only six weeks. It comes without a spring, and departs without an autumn. Nature seems, while it lasts, to put forth her utmost energies to call back the loveliness which a savage winter had destroyed, to produce her blossoms and ripen her seeds. The temperature rises during the day from 64° to 68° Fahr., seldom exceeding 70°; but the nights are cold. In the south, especially, flowers are everywhere; on the banks of the streams, now swollen by the melting snow; on the ragged walls of the ravines, beneath sheltering rocks, on ocean cliffs where the salt sea foam cannot reach them; their odors stealing through secluded glens, and up hillsides which are carpeted with mosses of many hues, green and golden and carmine, and often two or three feet deep.

The flora of northern Labrador is very scanty. The terribly bleak coast valleys west of Cape Chudleigh are either treeless or sustain forests of dwarf-birch. The tiny trunks are twisted like a corkscrew, the foliage is puny, and smoothly clipped by the wind as with a pair of shears. The willows creep along the ground among mosses in matted beds. Further inland the spruce flourishes, but never grows to any great size. Summer scarcely can be said to visit this inhospitable clime, where in July snow often falls, and northerly gales, ice-laden and awful, wither every particle of fresh green leafage; where the gardens of the missionaries must be dug out of the snow in the spring, and during the summer must be protected every night with mats, on account of the severe frosts.

Here are represented the ranun- Insect life is sparse on the Labrador culus: cruciferous flowers, like the coast. The common pests of the world lady's smock and the icy whitlow are not absent, but the hum and drone grass; rosacea in abundance; saxi- and cheep of our own woodlands and frages like the aizoon with its silver meadows are not much heard. A yelrosettes, and the S. oppositifolia with low fly may flit by, an Arctic bumbleits glowing constellation of rich pur- bee buzz in the bell of some flower, or ple; stonecrops; a few quaint or a sheeny beetle sun himself on a leaf; chids; twenty species of the heath but you never hear the strident note of family, fragrant and bee-haunted; the a grasshopper, never see the flash of a Alpine speedwell, and many lilies; the dragon-fly; even the wasp is uncomdwarf Arctic laurel and the Labrador mon. If you catch a glimpse of the tea-plant. We see in the midst of rare Arctic bluet butterfly you will be more brilliantly painted flowers, like fortunate. Moths are more plentiful, the gentians, such world-wide wan- but are so perfectly harmonized in derers as the dandelion and the silver color with the vegetation amidst which weed of our roadsides. The wild they live that it is difficult to detect strawberry creeps luxuriantly, inter- them. Out of ten species of spiders twining itself with the honeysuckle, collected by Dr. Packard, seven were and not far away are the wild currant new to science. For complete lists of and the cloudberry. Here was a all known species we must refer the beautiful iris, a mountain trident with lover of natural history to Dr. Packits simple white flower, and, in all the ard's volume, and to the same pages glory of its rose-colored petals, the for an interesting record of successful willow-herb, the "fireweed," as the dredging along the coast in search of Americans call it, in company with the the plant and animal life of the sea. golden-rod. Deep gulches are still half"Of all pleasures of a naturalist's ex

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