LIV THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



and rich strawberry jam and some kind of cake for desert. On 

 Friday there will certainly be fish, perhaps cod for breakfast and 

 salmon for dinner and herring for supper, all fresh out of the water, 

 or perhaps nothing but salt herring will appear on the table, but 

 there will never be meat. Usually a comfortably fitted room will 

 be available at night, though the family may have to adjust itself 

 to the undivided upper story. On the walls of the room you will 

 probably find a crucifix and religious pictures, the latter very crude; 

 while on the walls of the sitting room there are apt to be grotesque 

 enlargements of family portraits and very sentimental coloured 

 advertisements in which pretty girls and mothers with babies play 

 a large part. In the morning the man of the house will offer his 

 services to drive you to the next parish, from eight to fifteen miles 

 away, and will be shocked and puzzled to learn that a geologist 

 prefers to walk. 



In some of the houses, small as they are, four generations may 

 be represented and you may see a great-grandmother with bent back 

 and wrinkled face, a well-preserved middle-aged grandfather with his 

 careworn wife, who is the manager of the house, and husky young 

 men and comely women of the third generation, one of them nursing 

 a fat baby of the fourth. How they are all accommodated in addition 

 to a guest is a wonder. In the cool of evening neighbours come in 

 and sit round the stove in the combined kitchen and living-room and 

 jokes pass or arguments take place, but no one seems crowded. 



It may be thought that the northern Gaspesians are contented 

 because they know nothing of any other world, but this is not wholly 

 true. Now and then one is encountered who speaks English and 

 who tells you of his nine year's stay at Fall River or elsewhere in the 

 New England States. He has no very convincing reason to give why 

 he left the gay life of the city for the hard and lonely existence on the 

 coast of Gaspé with seven months winter, but there seems a charm 

 in the white birch and the snow laden branches of the spruce and in 

 the mild sunshine when the fog lifts from the sea that is potent enough 

 to bring back at least some of the wanderers from far countries. 



These primitive features of the northern Gaspesian civilization 

 have changed but little within forty years, while all around modern 

 commerce and industrial life have been changing things enormously. 

 How much longer will this isolated population keep aloof from the 

 world about it? Will it still retain its dialect, its ballads, its homely 

 mode of living and its mediaeval point of view while the rest of the 

 world moves forward? 



