as dismissed
as psychopathic. I wish that a similarly simple diagnosis accounted
for the mysterious ailments of automobiles. My meditations on modern
science were interrupted by an insistent voice proclaiming that "my
head is like to burst abroad."

If I were a woman on this coast my temper would "burst abroad" to see
the men--some of them--spitting all over the floors of the cottages:
disgusting and particularly dangerous in a country where the
arch-enemy, tuberculosis, is ever on the watch for victims. But the
new era is slowly dawning. Now, instead of hooking "Welcome Home" into
the fireside mat, you find "DONT SPIT" worked in letters of
flame. It is the harbinger of the feminist movement in the land.

Speaking of the feminist movement makes me think of a woman at
Aquaforte Harbour. She deserves a book written about her. In the first
place, Elmira had the courage of her convictions, and did not marry.
Her convictions were that marriage was desirable if you get the right
man who can support you properly, and not otherwise. This is
generations in advance of the local attitude to the holy estate. She
has lived a life of single blessedness to the coast. In every trouble
along her section of the shore it is "routine" to send for "Aunt"
'Mira. She has more sense and unselfishness and native wit than you
would meet in ten products of civilization. For a year she acted as
nurse to the little boy of one of the staff, and never was child
better cared for. They once told 'Mira she really must make baby take
his bottle. (He had the habit of profound slumber at that time.) "Oh!
I does, ma'm," 'Mira replied. "If he dwalls off, I gives him a
scattered jolt." The family took her to England with them, and her
remarks on the trains showed where her ancestry lay. When they backed
she exclaimed, "My happy day! We're goin' astern!" She requested to be
allowed to "open the port"; and at a certain junction where there was
a long delay she asked to go "ashore for a spell."

That "hell is paved with good intentions" is no longer a glib phrase
to me; it is a conviction born of seeing some of the suffering of this
country. The doctor has just been ashore to see a woman with a
five-days old baby. No attempt whatever had been made to get her or
her bed clean or comfortable. She had developed a violent fever, and
the local midwives, with their congenital terror of the use of
water--internal or external--had larded the miserable creature over