pitable housewives sometimes surrender their spare chambers to the travelling salesman and to that much rarer avis, the summer tourist.
The habits, the speech, the folk and sea-lore of this remote fringe of a far-north island are of distinct and absorbing interest. The manners of the people are winning. Crime is almost unknown. If a constable dies in even so comparatively important a district as Burgeo, it may be months before one is appointed in his place. Occasionally a man who has signed for the Banks fails to appear at the hour of his schooner's sailing, or a master runs his vessel ashore to collect fraudulent insurance. The courts rarely have other offences to deal with. Sometimes the stranger comes upon a fact startling in its primitiveness. One may be cited, almost unbelievable and yet reasonable enough when local conditions are weighed: few of the inhabitants ever saw a horse. A frowsy little beast of the Newfoundland pony type being transported to Port-aux-Basques on the deck of the Glencoe drew wide-eyed groups at every port between its point of embarkation and its destination. At Rencontre beyond the whale factory at Balena, there were some older folk who remembered a blind horse that had died thirty years before, but those whose memories were more restricted found of the utmost interest the pony's tail, its rough brown coat and flexible ears. Once upon a time a south coast inhabitant received as a present a white horse.
