_June 17._--On this anniversary of the Battle of Bunker's Hill we sailed from Sleupe Harbor. Little Mecatina, with its blue perspective and billowy surface, lifted itself up astern under flooding sunshine to tell us that this relentless coast could have a glory of its own; but we looked at it with dreamy, forgetful eyes, thinking of the dear land, now all tossed into wild surge and crimson spray of war, which, how far soever away, is ever present to the hearts of her true children. Next day we dropped into the harbor of Caribou Island, a mission-station, and left again on the 20th, after a quiet Sunday,--Bradford having gone with others to church, and come back much moved by the bronze-faced earnestness, and rough-voiced, deep-chested hymning of the fisherman congregation. Far ahead we saw the strait full of ice. Not that the ice itself could be seen; but the peculiar, blue-white, vertical striae, which stuccoed the sky far along the horizon, told experienced eyes that ice was there. Away to the right towered the long heights of Newfoundland, intensely blue, save where, over large spaces, they shone white with snow. They surprised us by their great elevation, and by the sharp and straight escarpments with which they descended. Here and there was a gorge cut through as with a saw. We then took all this in good faith, on the fair testimony of our eyes. But experience brought instruction,--as it will in superficial matters, whether in deeper ones or no. In truth, this appearance was chiefly a mirage caused by ice. For, of all solemn prank-players, of all mystifiers and magicians, ice is the greatest. Coming out of its silent and sovereign dreamland in the North, it brings its wand, and goes wizard-working down the coast. A spell is about it; enchantment is upon it like a garment; weirdness and illusion are the breath of its nostrils. Above it, along the horizon, is a strange columned wall, an airy Giant's Causeway, pale blue, paling through ethereal gray into snow. Islands quit the sea, and become islands in the sky, sky-foam and spray seen along their bases. Hills shoot out from their summits airy capes and headlands, or assume upon their crowns a wide, smooth table, as if for the service of genii. Ships sail, bergs float, in the heavens. Here a vast obelisk of ice shoots aloft, half mountain high; you gaze at it amazed, ecstatic,--calculating the time it will take to come up with it,--whistling, if you are still capable of that levity, for a wind. But now it begins to waver, to dance slowly, to shoot up minarets and take them back, to put forth arms which change into wands, wave and disappear; and ere your wonder has found a voice, it rolls itself together like a scroll, drops nearly to the ocean-level, and is but a gigantic ice-floe after all!