We are now, however, able to affirm that the interior is all one immense elevated plateau. Information which I obtained from an elderly missionary at Hopedale, together with numerous indications that an intelligent naturalist would know how to construe, enabled P---- to determine this fact with confidence. It is a table-land "varying from five to twenty-five hundred feet in height." Here not a tree grows, not a blade of grass, only lichens and moss, What a vast and terrible waste it must be! Where else upon the earth are all the elements of desolation so combined? The missionary in question had penetrated to the borders of this _cold_ desert and looked out over it. "No up _und_ down," he said. "No dree. Notting grow. All level." Within some one hundred and fifty miles of the coast this terrible table-land breaks up into wild hills, separated by valleys that plunge down suddenly, in rocky steeps, from the heights, more gorges than valleys. These hills are all fearfully scarred. One sees in them abundant record of the Titanic old-time warfare between rock and ice. A prodigious contest it was. Sometimes the top of a hill--clean, live rock--was sliced off, as with a knife. "Like the tops of our conical cheeses, when they came to the table," said P---- The valleys are wooded with fir, spruce, larch, and, more to the south, with birch. At a distance from the sea and in favorable situations these trees grow to good forest size, even beyond the middle latitudes of Labrador. In latitude 53 deg. a resident told me that trees were found eighteen inches in diameter. This statement was derided when I told it on board, and the witty Judge kept the table in a roar for half an hour with pleasantries about it. But at Hopedale, two and a half degrees farther north, we learned that sticks of timber fifty feet in length were often brought to the station; while one had found its way there which was fifty-six feet long and ten inches in diameter at the smaller end. Toward the sea these forests dwindle, till on the immediate coast they wholly disappear. At Caribou Island, which, the reader will remember, is _south_ of the Strait of Belle Isle, I found in a ravine some sadly stunted spruces, firs, and larches, not more than three feet high,--melancholy, wind-draggled, frightened-looking shrubs, which had wondrously the air of lifelong ill-usage. The tangled tops were mostly flattened and pressed over to one side, and altogether they seemed so piteous, that one wished to say, "Nobody shall do so to you any more, poor things!" Excepting these, the immediate coast, for five or six hundred miles that we skirted it, was absolutely treeless.