One can conceive St. John's as the ideal pirate lair of a romance-maker of the Stevensonian tradition, and one can understand it appealing to the bold, freebooting instincts of the first daring settlers. A ring of rough, stratified hills grips the harbour water about, sheltering it from storms and land enemies, while with the strong hills at the water-gate to command it, and a chain drawn across its Narrows, it was safe from incursion of water-borne foes. It was the fitting stronghold of the reckless Devon, Irish and Scots fishermen who followed Cabot to the old Norse _Helluland_, the "Land of Naked Rocks," and who vied and fought with, and at length ruled with the rough justice of the "Fishing Admirals" the races of Biscayan and Portuguese men who made the island not a home but a centre of the great cod fishery that supplied Europe. St. John's has laboured under its disadvantages ever since those days. The town has been pinched between the steep hills, and forced to straggle back for miles along the harbour inlet. On the southern side of the basin the slope has beaten the builder, and on the dominant green hill, through the grass of which thrusts grey and red-brown masses of the sharp-angled rock stratum, there are very few houses. On the north, humanity has made a fight for it, and the white, dusty roads struggle with an almost visible effort up the heavy grade of the hill until they attain the summit. The effect is of a terraced and piled-up city, straggling in haphazard fashion up to the point where the great Roman Catholic cathedral, square-hewn and twin-towered, crowns the mass of the town. Plank frame houses, their paint dingy and grey, with stone and brick buildings, jostle each other on the hill-side streets, innocent of sidewalks. The main thoroughfare, Water Street, which runs parallel with the harbour and the rather casual wharves, is badly laid, and given to an excess of mud in wet weather, mud that the single-deck electric trams on their bumpy track distribute lavishly. The black pine masts that serve as telegraph-poles are set squarely and frequently in the street, and overhead is the heavy mesh of cables and wires that forms an essential part of all civic scenery in the West. The buildings and shops along this street are not imposing, and there seems a need for revitalization in the town, either through a keener overseas trading and added shipping facilities, or a broader and more encouraging local policy.