LEPER HOSPITAL. 25 



Tracadi, and Young s farm is a portion of this. The 

 population in the neighbourhood is considerable, and 

 almost entirely French. Of these people, we saw a 

 large number employed on Young s farm, in taking up 

 his excellent crop of potatoes. 



This low coast is indented with large lagoons, pro 

 tected from the waters of the Bay of St Lawrence by 

 narrow stripes of land sandbanks, I suppose, thrown 

 up by the strong tides, though I had no opportunity of 

 personally inspecting them. The Tracadi lagoon is one 

 of these, of six or eight miles in length, and in some 

 places a couple of miles in breadth, arid is named from 

 two small rivers, the Tracadi and the Little Tracadi, 

 which fall into it. At the mouth of the Little Tracadi, 

 near which we now were, it was a beautiful sheet of 

 water, skirted with rich low land, which again was girt 

 about behind with fine old trees of the hardwood forest, 

 through which we found it a pleasure to ride, when the 

 warmth of the bright sun began to beat upon us. 



We ferried across the lagoon to the site of the village, 

 the church, the school, and the presbytere ; and we paid a 

 visit to a singular hospital for lepers, which has been 

 established in this remote spot. The disease here called 

 leprosy is confined almost exclusively to the French 

 population, and to the north-eastern part of the province, 

 between the mouth of the Miramichi and the Bay de 

 Chaleur. It attacks all ages, is by some said to be 

 either infectious or contagious though others deny that 

 it is either and has prevailed for many years in this 

 district, though public attention has been drawn to it 

 only at a comparatively recent period. Nearly all the 

 known cases are now collected in the small hospital at 

 Tracadi, which has been established and is maintained at 

 the expense of the Provincial Government. We found 

 them to be thirty-five in number, including males and 

 females, children and grown-up persons ; and the picture 



