Never before in their lives having seen a canoe, they had thought me an Indian — such is the association of ideas in a boy’s mind. One little fellow was the “spittin’ image” of a previous acquaintance of mine in Charlottetown. Or was it my imagination? Of course, I had to be mistaken.

The boys showed a great interest in Tota, were now very friendly and insisted that I stay overnight at one of their homes.

At the first house back from the beach I enjoyed an excellent fresh-mackerel supper, but decided, in spite of the warning that the rats would eat me, to go back and sleep in the Lobster factory in order to get an early start in the morning. My bed for the night con- sisted of a table-like zinc-lined lobster-sorting tray, hard but snug; my protection against rodents a short length of lead pipe, which, however, I had no call to use. I suppose I might have been charged with “break and enter”, but heard nothing about it.

VIII

And now I come to the hardest, or at least the roughest, part of my voyage —— from Campbell’s Cove to Cable Head, a raw region with a straight, seemingly unending succession of high rocky cliffs with deep water below and facing into the nor’ east sweep across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and with but a few short scattered sand- beaches in between -— the scene of many cruel shipwrecks from the earliest days and some even more recently.

Next morning, bright and early I departed Campbell’s Cove stopping at Priest Pond for lunch and going ashore in mid-afternoon at a small cove near Rocka Barra, or “Rocky Bottom", so the Natives say, where the fishing boats are slid over a slope made in the cliff right into some 20 feet of water and must be hauled each day.

Here I visited at the home of Frank Bell MacDonald, father of one of my students. Mrs. MacDonald whispered to me, in an aside, “Ask ‘him’ to play the fiddle. He’s shy, but, perhaps, if you coax him ----- .”

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