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SOME OUTPORT FOLK

T had been a race against the peril of

I'

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

ghosts of houses. They started into sight, hung suspended in the night, vanished as we trudged on. The folk were all abed-all save Elisha Duckworthy, that pious giant, who had been late beating in from the fishing grounds off the Head. It was Elisha who opened the door to our knock, and sent a growling, bristling dog back to his place with a gentle word.

“Sure, sir,” said Elisha, a smile spreading from his eyes to the very tip of his great beard, "'twould be a hard man an' a bad Christian that would turn strangers away. Come in, sir! 'Tis a full belly you'll have when you leaves the table, an' 'tis a warm bed you'll sleep in, this night."

After family prayers, in which we, the strangers he had taken in, were commended to the care and mercy of God in such simple, feeling phrases as proved the fine quality of this man's hospitality and touched our hearts in their innermost parts, Elisha invited us to sit by the kitchen fire with him "for a

spell." While the dogs snored in chorus with a young kid and a pig by the roaring stove, and the chickens rustled and clucked in their coop under the bare spruce sofa which Elisha had made, and the wind flung the rain against the window-panes, we three talked of weather and fish and toil and peril and death. It may be that a cruel coast and a sea quick to wrath engender a certain dread curiosity concerning the “taking off” in a man who fights day by day to survive the enmity of both. Elisha talked for a long time of death and heaven and hell. Then, solemnly, his voice fallen to a whisper, he told of his father, Skipper George, a man of weakling faith, who had been reduced to idiocy by wondering what came after death -by wondering, wondering, wondering, in sunlight and mist and night, off shore in the punt, labouring at the splitting-table, at work on the flake, everywhere, wondering all the time where souls took their flight.

""Twere wonderin' whether hell do be underground or not," said Elisha, "that