We have come to the uttermost verge of the Continent in quest of "Down East," and find it elusive and still beyond us. There is yet the remote island of Newfoundland, and we are pointed thither as still "Down East." To the northward, lying in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, are the group of Magdalen Islands, where a steamer calls once a week, sailing from Pictou, these probably being about as far away as one would wish to go in his search. There are thirteen in the group, sixty miles off the extremity of Cape Breton Island, the bleak Cape North. Acadian fishermen live there, the population being about three thousand, and New England fishery fleets visit them for cod, mackerel and seals, with lobsters and sea-trout also abundant, so that these islands have come to be called in the Provinces the "Kingdom of Fish." Amherst Island is the chief, having the village and Custom House, the surface of this and other islands rising in high hills seen from afar. Coffin Island is the largest of the group, named after Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin, the original owner. Coffin was a native of Boston, and in colonial times a distinguished British naval officer. When he was a Captain he took Governor General Lord Dorchester to Canada in his frigate, and designing to enter the St. Lawrence, a furious storm arose. With skill he saved his vessel by managing to get under the lee of these islands, which broke the force of the gale, and Lord Dorchester in gratitude procured the grant of the group for Coffin. There are also the Bird Isles, two bare rocks of sandstone, the principal one called the Gannet Rock. These are haunted by immense numbers of sea-birds, whose eggs the islanders gather. The surf dashes violently against the gaunt rocks on all sides, and they have been visited by the greatest naturalists of the world, who found them a most interesting study. A lighthouse is erected on one of them. Charlevoix, in 1720, recorded his visit here, and his wonder how "in such a multitude of nests every bird immediately finds her own." It is also recorded of this remote region that it, too, is a colonizer, the people of the Magdalen Islands having established three small but prosperous colonies over on the Labrador shore. Outlying the group to the westward, eight miles from Amherst, is the desolate rock, resembling a corpse prepared for burial, known as Deadman's Isle. Tom Moore sailed past this gruesome place in 1804, and wrote the poem making it famous: "There lieth a wreck on the dismal shore Of cold and pitiless Labrador, Where, under the moon, upon mounts of frost, Full many a mariner's bones are tossed. "Yon shadowy bark hath been to that wreck, And the dim blue fire that lights her deck Doth play on as pale and livid a crew As ever yet drank the churchyard dew.