Sable Island is perhaps an even more evil spot in the North Atlantic than the ill-famed Newfoundland coast. It is a bleak, inhospitable, crescent-shaped collection of sand-dunes, eighty-five miles due east of Nova Scotia and lying right in the steamship tracks. A more uninviting stretch of dry land could not be conceived. Little grows here beyond a special kind of brush, which appears to flourish in sea-swept billows of sand. But the obstacle is formidable, being twenty-two miles in length by a mile in width at its broadest part. This does not constitute the extent of its dangers--far from it. The island is slowly but surely being swallowed up by the restless, hissing sea, with the result that, when one stands on the almost indistinguishable line where sea meets land, an aspect of white ruffs of foam curl in all directions as far as the eye can see, where the surf is thundering over the shoals. I have related the toll that this island of the dead has exacted from shipping,[A] and now confine myself to describing the means that have been provided to warn the mariner off its bars. The Canadian Government maintains two lighthouses, at the western and eastern extremities respectively, and those entrusted with their safe-keeping have as lonely an existence as may be conceived. The welcome face of a stranger never brightens their lives, except when the relief-boat draws in as far as it dares in the calmest weather, or when some luckless wretches are snatched from a vessel which has fallen into the toils of the sand and is doomed. The sea-birds and seals are their sole companions on this lonely outpost. [A] “The Steamship Conquest of the World,” chapter xxi., p. 299. [Illustration: _Photo by courtesy of Lieut.-Col. W. P. Anderson._ THE LIGHT AT THE SOUTHERN END OF BELLE ILE. This Canadian beacon throws its rays from a height of 470 feet. In foggy weather the headland often is obscured by fog, so an auxiliary light has been provided 346 feet below.]