ST. PAUL’S ISLAND.—CAPE NORTH.—COAST OF CAPE BRETON.—SYDNEY
LIGHT AND HARBOR.—THE END OF OUR VOYAGE TO LABRADOR, AND AROUND
NEWFOUNDLAND.
THURSDAY, _July 21_. After a boisterous night we are on deck again, and
find a pleasant change in the wind. It is gray and rainy, but then our
sails swell, and we rush southward.
A dome of inhospitable rock peers through the mist, one of nature’s
penitentiaries, which no living man would own, and so has been deeded to
St. Paul: Melita is Eden to it. The saints, it appears to me, have been
gifted with the ruggedest odds and ends. Wherever, on all these
cast-iron shores, there is a flinty promontory, upon which Prometheus
himself would have shuddered to be chained, there the name of an apostle
has been transfixed. Yonder is Cape North, the stony arrow-head of Cape
Breton, a headland, rather a multitudinous group of mountain headlands,
draped with gloomy grandeur, against the black cliffs of which the surf
is now firing its snowy rockets. How is it they have not called it Cape
St. Mary or St. John? All in all, this is a fine termination of the
picturesque isle. Steep and lofty, its summits are darkened by steepled
evergreens, and its many sides gashed with horrid fissures and ravines.
Here we part from the broad gulf, and enter the broader ocean, passing
between the promontories of Cape Breton and the last capes of
Newfoundland, Cape Anguille, and Cape Ray with its rocky domes and
tables. Thus have we fairly encompassed this Ireland of America, in all
but climate. White seabirds, with long wings tipped with black, sweep
the air. We speed onward and homeward past the many-folded mountains.
The eye slides along their graceful outlines, and follows their winding
shores. Through the deep valleys we look upon the landscapes interior,
softened by a purple atmosphere. Clouds are breaking around the woody
summits, seas of forest-tops are smiling in the sunshine, and shadows
are filling the rocky gorges with a kind of twilight. At last the sun is
sinking behind the distant heights, and leaving his red footsteps on the
clouds. C—— is painting his last picture, and these are the last
pencillings of the voyage. We hail the cliffs of Sydney—those
remarkable cliffs that sat upon the horizon like tinted sea-shells, on
the Sunday afternoon we were on our way to St. Johns. And yonder is the
Sydney light twinkling through the dusk of evening. Our summer sail to
Labrador and around Newfoundland is over. Where the anchor brings the
vessel to a pause, there shall we leave the brave little pinkstern. May
her wanderings in the future under the Union Jack be as happy as those
of the present have been under the Stars and Stripes. Thankful for the
Divine care, we will ask protection for the night, and guidance home,
the final haven where we would be.