IN A FISHING COUNTRY 



paths traverse the wooded hillsides; short 

 cuts from settlement to settlement, or 

 direct ways to beaches and fisheries. It is 

 certain that some of them, now hard even 

 to trace, have been in use for above two 

 hundred years; perhaps indeed for a vastly 

 longer time as aboriginal trails. The extinct 

 industry of smuggling suggests itself here 

 and there as an explanation. Only in our 

 own day have nomadic Indians deserted 

 the country. Their summer lodges near 

 the wharf, where they wove baskets and 

 built canoes for a living, are within memory. 

 Georges Duberger first offered the ac- 

 commodations of a hotel to the summer 

 migrant about 1850. This landmark, where 

 the house of M. Edouard Warren now 

 stands, was swept away by the fire of 1894, 

 with some forty cottages in the very heart 

 of Pointe au Pic. Madame Micheletti's 

 boarding-house, near Duhcryer's, and now 

 fading into the mists of fifty years 

 ago, calls up a single undimmed picture. 

 A little milk-shed with shelves and 

 bowls to the roof : the stage. Two lads and 

 a Newfoundland dog that looms gigantic: 

 the actors. Might the shed contain the 

 dog? There was no guilty mind, merely a 

 ory. 



32 



