a language in which Canadian French and camp English was
strangely mingled of the service they had seen on the British front.

It is the district where the clever and painstaking French
agriculturist gets every grain out of the soil, a district where we
could see the spire of a parish church every six miles, the land of a
people, sturdy, devout, tenacious and law-abiding, the "true 'Canayen'
themselves,"

"And in their veins the same red stream;
The conquering blood of Normandie
Flowed strong, and gave America
Coureurs de bois and voyageurs
Whose trail extends from sea to sea!"

as William Henry Drummond, a true poet who drew from them inspiration
for his delightful dialect verse, describes them.

The railway passes for hundreds of miles between habitant farms. The
land is beautifully cared for, every fragment of rock, from a boulder
to a pebble, having been collected from the soil through generations,
and piled in long, thin caches in the centres of the fields. The
effect of passing for hundreds of miles between these precisely aligned
cairns is strange; one cannot get away from the feeling that the rocky
mounds are there for some barbaric tribal reason, and that presently
one will see a war dance or a sacrifice taking place about one of them.

The farms themselves have a strange appearance. They have an
abnormally narrow frontage. They are railed in strips of not much
greater breadth than a London back garden, though they extend away from
the railway to a depth of a mile and more. At first this grouping of
the land appears accidental, but the endlessness of the strange design
soon convinces that there is a purpose underlying it.

Two explanations are offered. One is that the land has been parcelled
out in this way, and not on a broad square acreage, because in the old
pioneer days it afforded the best means of grouping the homesteads
together for defence against the Red Man. The other is that it is the
result of the French-Canadian law which enforces the division of an
estate among children in exact proportion, and thus the original big
farms have been split up into equal strips among the descendants of the
original owner. Either of these explanations, or the combination of
them, can be accepted.

At Campbellton, a pretty, toy-like town, close up to La Baie de
Chaleur, there is gathered a remnant of the Micmac Indians, whom the
first settlers feared. They have a settlement of their own on