Another passenger was the Rev. Thomas Greavett, Church of England “parson,” with a parish 100 miles long on the West Coast between Cow Head and Flower’s Cove. He had to be medicine-man and lawyer too, and in his black satchel he carried a stomach-pump, a syringe, eight match-boxes of medicine and Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall.” He told me how he hated to use the mail-boat for his parish visiting, for it generally meant sleepless nights of pacing the deck or sitting in the lifeboat in default of a berth. He carried a petition, to go before the Legislature, reciting the many reasons why the poor little boat on which we were travelling is inadequate to the heavy freight and passenger traffic in which she is engaged. With accommodations for hardly more than 50 passengers, she has carried 210, 235 and even 300, which meant acute discomfort for everybody and the open deck, night and day, for many passengers. What is wanted is a big, heavy ice-breaker. The _Ethie_ never was meant by her Glasgow builders to fight the Humboldt Glacier bit by bit as it falls into the sea. In December she was wrecked off Cow Head in a gale, fortunately with no loss of life. I don’t know of a harder-working lot than the crew and captain of a boat that undertakes to carry freight and passengers between southern ports of Newfoundland and the Labrador. Take the experience of this vessel, the _Ethie_, in the summer of 1919 as an example. Under a thoroughly capable and chart-perfect skipper, Captain English, she made several ineffectual attempts to get to Battle Harbour through the dense ice-jam before she finally made that roadstead on June 24. When I met her at Curling to go north, a week late, at the end of August, she had just come out of a viscous fog of four days’ duration in the Strait of Belle Isle and in that fog she had escaped by the closest of shaves a collision with a berg that towered above her till the top of it was lost in the fog. She carried so many passengers, short-haul or long-distance, that every seat in the dining saloon was filled with weary folk at night and some paced the decks or sat on the piles of lathes or the oil-barrels. Lumber and barrels were stored everywhere, the hold was crammed, and cattle in the prow came and went mysteriously as the vessel moved into one cove or bight or tickle after another in the dead of the night or the silver cool of the early morning. The clatter of the steam-winch with the tune of babies strange to the sea-trip, the slap and scuffle of the waves on our sheet-iron sides and the banging of the doors as the vessel writhed in her discomfort made an orchestra of many tongues and percussions. The boat was so heavy with her cargo of machinery, oil, lumber, flour ($24 a barrel at Battle Harbour), cattle and human beings that the deck outside my stateroom was hardly two feet out of water. There were four of us in the stateroom, but the population changed almost hourly from port to