CHAPTER LVI.
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.