advanced down stream, the unorganised "Canadian Labrador" receded before
it. Fifty years ago the dividing line was at Seven Islands, 300 miles
below Quebec. To-day it runs just east of Natashquan and is a full 500
miles below.

There is no stranger country anywhere than this Canadian Labrador. Dr
Grenfell's Labrador, which has nothing to do with Canada, is known to
everyone. But the very existence of our own Labrador, with its 200
miles of coastline and its more than 20,000 islands, is quite unknown,
as a separate entity, to all but a very few outside of its little, but
increasing, population of 1200 souls. It lies on the north shore of the
Gulf, just inside the Straits of Belle Isle, and runs from Bradore in
the east to Kegashka in the west. Here, close beside the crowded track
of ocean liners, and well below the latitude of London, is by far the
most southerly arctic region in the world. It is a land of rock and
moss; for, except along the river valleys, there are neither grass nor
trees. No crops are grown or ever can be grown. There are no horses,
cattle, poultry, pigs or sheep. Reindeer are said to be coming. But
there are none at present. The only domestic animals are dogs, that howl
like wolves, but never bark. And yet it is a country which is rich, and
might he richer still, in fish and fur, and which seems formed by Nature
to be a perfect paradise of all that is most desirable in the wild life
of the north, especially in the seabirds that are now being done to
death among its countless archipelagoes.

Its natural features are not the only strange things in it. It is a
curiosity of government, or, rather, of the want of government. It is
_in_ the Province of Quebec and _in_ the Dominion; yet, in one sense,
not _of_ either. For it in the only place of its kind inhabited by
educated whites, in any part of the self-governing Empire, where no man