The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-12-26
ISOLATION OF NEWFOUNDLAND.

It is probable that no English-speak- 1 ing people is at this time so utterly
 isolated from all things of advanced
 civilization as the folk who fish from | the little harbors which lie along that | stretch of the east coast of Newfound- | land, between Cape John on the south l and the Straits of Belle Isle on the | north. There are no roads, no paths, leading from harbor to harbor. The
 land is wilderness, dense, trackless, infested with black flies and mosqui- toes, which brave men dare not chal- lenge for many days in hot weather, for fear of their lives. Shore fishermen would rather take their little punts through forty miles of tossing sea than suffer the fatigue and terrors of two-
 mile tramp inland. Communication, indeed, is only by punt and skiff; and
 so rarely do the people go from place to place that a woman went from home
 with her husband to settle in a harbor five miles distant did not see her
 relatives again for fifteen years More
 over, the mail- l-steamer touches at but
 two of the more important settlements.
 and that only at fortnightly intervals in
 June, July, and August The news of
 the world. in distorted form, is passed
 along by word of mouth, long after it
 ceased to be acutely interesting to the
 people of more favored lands.
 'Tis said,' said an old man of
 Round Harbor, who had heard of the first British defeat in South Africa,
 that the English do be beaten Do the Boers be after capturing St. Johns yet? Do they be fighting there, tell me?'
 One meets such absurd misconcep- tions upon every hand. To many of the men of that coast, the world, which is flat and almost circumscribed by the horizon, is a world of sea and rocks and punts and fish. Their imagination carries them no farther, and they come into touch with the things of other places so rarely that they cannot com prehend the information which the new and passing association has brought to them.
 Does they catch fish with squd or caplin for bait in New York arbor?" was boys question at Englee.
 An attempt to describe a circus to this lad few moments later, had to be abandoned. It would have taken the whole afternoon to define the terms. What was sawdust? What was a tent? What did a horse look like? What was uniform. What was springboard? What was an acrobat? What was band? What was horn? Was it like the bait-skiff conch? What was drum? What was chariot? What was a procession? What was a pea nut? AS for clowns, lemonade, ele- phants--these were incomprehensible Questions, politely put, interrupted ev- cry sentence. The lad was soon in maze, out of which he could not be led. The attempt had, indeed, to be aban- doned. But the writer did succeed in describing q brick a sidewalk and a plough. When it came, however. in the evening, to helping the lads mother to an understanding of the lives of the women of New York he was over whelmed.
 "They tells me-" she said, "that the women up there do be good hand t split fish. Now, how many quintal can they do in a day?'
 She did not doubt that she could split more than any of them, and she was proud that she could. ,,
 My daughter Maria" she went on. as if in challenge, "can lift barrel of four
 Maria, a muscular young woman of l eighteen, with dark hair, large blue eyes, and fine pink and white com l plexion, blushed and admitted that she | could. She had rowed the punt twelve | miles that morning, she said, and she could sail it in a gale like man.
 That she can, sir said her father. | "She can sail it so well as me. Nor l man Duncan in Ainsee's Magazine.