196 NEWFOUNDLAND 



Mr. Leslie is the son of an English army doctor who had 

 fought at Waterloo, and himself a man of good education and 

 attainments ; he had isolated himself in this out-of-the-way 

 corner of the earth quite voluntarily. Bay Despair was indeed 

 a lonely place when he first came to it and built the station 

 twenty-five years ago. There were no inhabitants but the 

 Micmac Indians, who dearly loved him for his honest dealings, 

 and the wild geese which came in spring and the caribou 

 in winter. He is a man who despises civilisation in all 

 its ways. With poor pay as the operator of the telegraph 

 station of the Anglo-American Company, he had nevertheless 

 married twice, and supported a family of twenty-one souls. 

 The nature of the man may be signified by his lament to me 

 that Bay Despair was now getting "too crowded." He said 

 there were now no less than thirty to forty souls, mostly in 

 the employment of a saw-mill which had recently been started, 

 so he was on the look-out for some place where a man could 

 live in peace without being "hustled." His chief sorrow was 

 the threatened extinction of the Anglo-American Company, 

 which for so many years had been the only means of com- 

 munication of the Newfoundland people with the outer 

 world. 



After a chat with Mr. and Mrs. Leslie, and a meal of 

 cloudberries and cream, I started through the dark woods in 

 the direction of camp, which I found on the banks of a small 

 river coming in at the head of the bay. 



No travellers or hunters ever come this way, our sole 

 forerunners up the Bale d'Est waters being that old sports- 

 man. General Dashwood, who has now passed on, Alexander 

 Murray, and the ubiquitous Mr. Howley. General Dash- 

 wood and Mr. Howley had made the journey via the Baie 

 d'Est system up to Pipestone Lake, and thence to Crooked 



