The Newfoundland coast greatly resembles that of Norway. Looking shoreward, we see great headlands jutting out into the ocean, their precipitous sides rising straight out of the water for three or four hundred feet. Between them are deep bays and inlets, walled with sheer rock. At the heads of the coves and smaller bays we can see the white houses of little villages, clinging to the hillsides above tiny beaches. On top, these great rock ridges are covered with low scrub, now in red and brown autumn dress. Now we are approaching St. John’s, which has one of the famous natural harbours of the world. Our steamer heads for what seems an unbroken wall of rock, five hundred feet high, and surmounted by a mighty stone tower. This is Cabot Tower, erected to commemorate the discovery of Newfoundland in 1497 by John Cabot, the Venetian mariner commissioned by Henry VII of England to find him new dominions. Except for the Vikings, five centuries earlier, Cabot was really the first to discover the North American continent, as Columbus did not reach the mainland until some years later. Just south of the Cabot Tower is Cape Spear, the “farthest east” point of all North America. It was on these hills that Marconi received the first wireless message flashed across the Atlantic, and from them that the first transatlantic hydroplane flight was begun. On these shores, also, several of our transatlantic cables are landed. [Illustration: Like pirate ships of old, icebergs in spring hover about the rock-bound entrance to St. John’s harbour. The channel is so narrow that the French once closed it to the British ships by a chain from shore to shore.] But see, there is an opening in the wall of rock straight ahead, and we get a glimpse of the harbour and the city beyond. The passage is only six hundred feet wide, and it seems much less from the deck of our steamer. Here the French, during their brief possession of St. John’s, slung chains across the Narrows to prevent the entrance of enemy ships. Inside the Narrows, the harbour is about a mile long and one half as wide. It is fringed with a forest of masts and the smokestacks of steamers. On the right is St. John’s. The hill on which it is built rises so steeply from the water that we can see the whole sides of buildings, one above the other along the terraced streets. The painted brick or wooden structures give the city a rather drab appearance, which is emphasized by the absence of shade trees. This is partly because the town has been burned three times, the last time in 1892. Across the harbour the red and brown hillside is gashed here and there with the slate gray of stone pits, or splotched with fenced-in patches of green, so steep that it is hard to imagine how they are farmed.