the great boat goes riding on the back of a huge wave, and is carried high up on the beach in a mass of struggling water. To spring from their seats into the water, and hold hard the boat, now on the point of being swept back by the receding wave, is the work of an instant. Another moment they are left high and dry on the beach, another, and the returning wave and a vigorous run of the crew has borne her out of all harm's way. "Such is the ceremony of landing at Sable Island nine or ten months out of the year: though there are at times some sweet halcyon days when a lad might land in a flat. Dry-shod the visitor picks his way between the thoroughly drenched crew, picks up a huge scallop or two, admires the tumbling play of the round-headed seals, and plods his way through the deep sand of an opening between the hills, or gulch (so called) to the head-quarters establishment. And here, for the last fifty years, a kind welcome has awaited all, be they voluntary idlers or sea-wrecked men. Screened by the sand-hills, here is a well-stocked barn and barnyard, filled with its ordinary inhabitants, sleek milch cows and heady bulls, lazy swine, a horse grazing at a tether, with geese and ducks and fowls around. Two or three large stores and boat-houses, quarters for the men, the Superintendent's house, blacksmith shop, sailors' home for sea-wrecked men, and oil-house, stand around an irregular square, and surmounted by the tall flag-staff and crow's nest on the neighboring hill. So abrupt the contrast, so snug the scene, if the roar of the ocean were out of his ears, one might fancy himself twenty miles inland. "Nearly the first thing the visitor does is to mount the flag-staff, and climbing into the crow's nest, scan the scene. The ocean bounds him everywhere. Spread east and west, he views the narrow island in form of a bow, as if the great Atlantic waves had bent it around, nowhere much above a mile wide, twenty-six miles long, including the dry bars, and holding a shallow late thirteen miles long in its centre.