1861. She is the fourth of the Society's Labrador ships bearing the
well-known name "THE HARMONY."

[Illustration: "THE HARMONY."]




=WITH THE HARMONY TO LABRADOR=.

NOTES OF A VISIT BY THE REV. B. LA TROBE.


What can a summer visitor tell of Labrador, that great drear land
whose main feature is winter, the long severe winter which begins in
October and lasts until June? I have been sailing over summer seas,
where in winter no water is visible, but a wide waste of ice
stretching thirty, forty, fifty or more miles from the snowy shores.
In the same good ship "Harmony," I have been gliding between the
innumerable islands of the Labrador archipelago and up the fine fjords
stretching far inland among the mountains, but in winter those bays
and straits and winding passages are all white frozen plains, the
highways for the dog-sledge post from station to station. I have
visited each of our six mission-stations, dotted at intervals of from
forty to ninety miles along some 250 miles of the grand, rocky coast,
but I have seen them in their brightest and sunniest aspect, and can
only imagine how they look when stern winter has come to stay for
months, and the thermometer frequently descends to forty, fifty,
sixty, sometimes even seventy degrees below freezing point,
Fahrenheit. I have spent happy, busy days in those Christian villages,