The knitter is therefore a figure by the window when the cool days denote the approach of winter.
* * * *
The guide-books have a way of declaring Newfoundland to be “The Sportsman’s Paradise”, and, if you have ever taken your gun under arm and sallied forth after Caribou, or had a thirty-pound salmon rise to your fly in either the Big or the Little Codroy rivers, you can personally testify that the writers of those same guide-books do not exaggerate.
It is little to be wondered at, therefore, that the “Sportsman” from the New England States, from Canada and from Old England, is a figure often chanced upon in the glens, and “beating the streams” of the Codroy Mountains, in the West. Nothing is quite so romantic as sitting by a deep pool, the one selected by your guide as “the very best” and watching for the supreme moment when “the big one” springs to life at the end of your line.
But the tramp to get to the pool has its romance, too. For the scenery of inland Newfoundland, its fields of daisies, its sheep in the lanes, the fog lifting and swirling like wraith-figures of light dancers about the brows of the mountains, all combine to create an atmosphere of enchantment, the more enchanting perhaps, that the numbers of its discoverers are not yet so many as to wear away the edge of exclusiveness.
* * * *
Pursuit of the Romantic in Newfoundland sooner or later lands one in Saint John’s on the south side of the harbour, among the old, wooden square-riggers that compose that unique fleet peculiar to Terra Nova—the Sealers.
If you have ever seen a whaler of the old-type, belonging to the days of whale-boats and hand-harpoons, then you know something of the appearance of these old Sealers. Broad of beam, thick-planked, staunch-timbered, both steam-and-sail propelled, they go out of Saint John’s in March, blasting a channel for themselves through the ice with gunpowder. They carry a crew of several hundred, all of them seasoned sealers. The man of expert knowledge in picking up “Seals” hies him aloft to the barrel crow’s-nest.
And then begins that roaming quest of the seal that may stand these old Ramblers of the ice and the ocean, away to the northeast, or up toward “Belle Isle”, or even far into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, anywhere that they can “pick up” the herd of drifting amphibians, which are to yield the invaluable sealskin.
