the flake, and continued in earnest, a year or two later, when first he was strong enough to keep the head of his father's punt up to the wind. But they seem not to know that fishing is a hard or dangerous employment for instance, a mild-eyed, crooked old fellow-he was a cheerful Methodist, too, and subject to "glory-fits "who had fished from one harbour for sixty years, computed for me that he had put out to sea in his punt at least twenty thousand times, that he had been frozen to the seat of his punt many times, that he had been swept to sea with the ice-packs, six times, that he had weathered six hundred gales, great and small, and that he had been wrecked more times than he could "just mind" at the moment; yet he was the only old man ever I met who seemed honestly to wish that he might live his life over again!

The hook-and-line man has a lonely time of it. From earliest dawn, while the night yet lies thick on the sea, until in storm or calm or favouring breeze he makes harbour

in the dusk, he lies off shore, fishing-tossing in the lop of the grounds, with the waves to balk and the wind to watch warily, while he tends his lines. There is no jolly companionship of the forecastle and turf hut for him-no new scene, no hilarious adventure; nor has he the expectation of a proud return to lighten his toil. In the little punt he has made with his own hands he is forever riding an infinite expanse, which, in "fish weather," is melancholy, or threatening, or deeply solemn, as it may chance-all the while and all alone confronting the mystery and terrible immensity of the sea. It may be that he gives himself over to aimless musing, or, even less happily, to pondering certain dark mysteries of the soul; and so it comes about that the "mad-house 't Saint Johns" is inadequate to accommodate the poor fellows whom lonely toil has bereft of their senses-melancholiacs, idiots and maniacs "along o' religion.”

Notwithstanding all, optimism persists everywhere on the coast. One old fisher

man counted himself favoured above most men because he had for years been able to afford the luxury of cream of tartar; and another, a brawny giant, confessed to having a disposition so pertinaciously happy that he had come to regard a merry heart as his besetting sin. Sometimes an off-shore gale puts an end to all the fishing; sometimes it is a sudden gust, sometimes a big wave, sometimes a confusing mist, more often long exposure to spray and shipped water and soggy winds. It was a sleety off-shore gale, coming at the end of a sunny, windless day, that froze or drowned thirty men off Trinity Bay in a single night; and it was a mere puff on a "civil" eveningbut a swift, wicked little puff, sweeping round Breakheart Head-that made a widow of Elizabeth Rideout o' Duck Cove and took her young son away. Often, however, the hook-and-line man fishes his eighty years of life, and dies in his bed as cheerfully as he has lived and as poor as he was born.

I

X

SOME OUTPORT FOLK

T had been a race against the peril of fog and the discomfort of a wet night

all the way from Hooping Harbour. We escaped the scowl of the northeast, the gray, bitter wind and the sea it was fast fretting to a fury, when the boat rounded Canada Head and ran into the shelter of the bluffs at Englee-into the damp shadows sombrely gathered there. When the punt was moored to the stage-head, the fog had thickened the dusk into deep night, and the rain had soaked us to the skin. There was a light, a warm, yellow light, shining from a window, up along shore and to the west. We stumbled over an erratic footpath, which the folk of the place call "the roaad ”—feeling for direction, chancing the steps, splashing through pools of water, tripping over sharp rocks. The whitewashed cottages of the village, set on the hills, were like the