Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/478

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408
THE TOURIST'S MARITIME PROVINCES

the Government and of the two cable stations—the French and the Anglo-American—come here to spend their holidays.

The town of Miquelon is laid out along a single street and has a population of about five hundred. Most settlers chose St. Pierre as a residence because of the harbour.

Dog Island, a mile distant from St. Pierre, is a sprawling flat of land humped in the middle and strewn with rocks, drying-flakes, fisher huts and drowsy dogs, whose numbers give the island its name.

The village kindergarten had just been dismissed as we arrived opposite the shop of Madame Auguste Pinson, who for thirty-nine years has taught school behind the shop. Her pupils having been duly posed, with a few mothers hovering on the border, we were pressed to view the school-room where walls were ringed with four-inch benches, and adorned with the injunctions, "Never lie," and "Love your parents," together with other mottoes equally calculated to affect the morals of little Dog Islanders.

Returning across the harbour we hailed a boatload of fishermen rowing to the French vessel whose banner of smoke foretold early departure. They waved flat blue caps at our bobbing launch, happy deep-chested fellows who, though no one guessed it then, were soon to be ordered home to a sterner task than setting trawls and baiting hooks.