k ramparts and
saw-tooth reefs sticking up through the lace fret. Suddenly you twist
round a sharp angle of rock like the half closed leaf of a book. You
slip in behind the leaf of rock, and wriggle behind another
angle--"follow the tickles o' water" is, I believe, the term--and there
opens before you a harbor cove, land-locked, rock-walled from sea to
sky, with the fishermen's dories awash on a silver sea, with women in
brightly colored kirtles and top-boots and sunbonnets busy over the
fishing stages drying cod. Dogs and hogs are the only domestic animals
visible. The shore is so rocky that fences are usually little sticks
anchored in stones. There are not even many children; for the children
are off to sea soon as they can don top-boots and handle a line. There
is the store of "the planter" or outfitter--a local merchant, who
supplies schooners on shares for the season and too often holds whole
hamlets in his debt. There is the church. The priest or parson comes
poling out to meet your ship and get his monthly or half-yearly mail,
and there are the little whitewashed cots of the fisher folk. It is a
simpler life than the existence of the habitant of Quebec. It is more
remote from modern stress than the days of the Tudors. On the north
and west shore and in that sea strip of Labrador under Newfoundland's
jurisdiction and known in contradiction to Labrador as The
Labrodor--are whole hamlets of people that have never seen a railroad,
a cow, a horse. They are Devon people, who speak the dialect of Devon
men in Queen Elizabeth's day. You hear such expressions as "enow,"
"forninst," "forby"; and the mental attitude to life is two or three
centuries old.

"Why should we pay for railroads?" the people asked late as 1898. "Our
fathers used boats and their own legs." And one hamlet came out and
stoned a passing train. "Checks--none of your checks for me," roared
an out-port fisherman taking the train for the first time and lugging
behind him a huge canvas bag of clothes. "Checks--not for me! I know
checks! When the banks busted, I had your checks; and much good they
were." This was late as '98, and back from the pulp mills of the
interior and the railroad you will find conditions as antiquated to-day.

If Newfoundland is absolutely essential to a Greater Britain Overseas,
why is she not part of Canada? Because Canada refused to take her in.
Because Canada had not big enough vision to see her need of this