216 HUNTING CAMPS. 



303, which he thrust into my friend's hand. The car- 

 tridge misfired and jammed. Time itself cannot obliterate 

 the sear of such an episode, which, indeed, has since com- 

 pelled my friend to carry his rifle along some hundreds of 

 miles of toteroad and bushpath, but without ever again 

 coming face to face with such an opportunity. 



One of our halts on the way we made at a small wooden 

 house raised upon piles, in the fly-blown living room of 

 which a kindly, twinkling old lady, bent nearly double with 

 age, gave us, at a small cost, one of the most perfect meals 

 I have ever tasted. The house belonged to one of the 

 small farmers who cultivate little clearings beside the 

 forest-track. These people have an excellent life ; they 

 fulfil the dream of George Borrow, who saw himself in 

 imagination, assisted by an enormous progeny, felling the 

 trees and tilling the soil in the virgin woods of America. 

 As a rule, in the case of the French-Canadian, there is no 

 mistake about the progeny. Formerly, I believe, the State 

 bestowed a bounty upon parents whose offspring exceeded 

 the round dozen, but this has been discontinued. The 

 French-Canadians are extraordinarily prolific, and in this 

 connection I can remember arriving at a house and being 

 offered, with a friend, the hospitality of the family bed, 

 which, unless some of the family accepted the alternative 

 of the stable, had already seven claimants. 



The French-Canadian family, which lives in or upon the 

 skirts of the woodland, invariably possesses one or more 

 guns, generally muzzle-loaders of the kind that cost from 

 i to 285. in our money, and without which no member of 

 the household above the height of four feet or so ever seems 

 to move far from the door. The result is that the ruffed 

 and Canada grouse which haunt the edges of the bush 

 roads, and which these folk always shoot sitting, are being 

 sadly thinned. Nearer to the cities the Sunday sportsman 

 considers all that flies or is in any way eatable as fair quarry, 



