Leper Hospital of Tracadie. 53 



middle life, and from middle life to old age, with no society 

 but that of his fellow-sufferers, with no employment, no amuse- 

 ment, no resource ; with nothing to mark his hours but the 

 arrival of some fresh victim ; with nothing to do except to 

 watch his companions slowly dying around him. Hardly any 

 of the patients could read, and those who could had no books. 

 No provision seems to be made to furnish them with any 

 occupation, either bodily or mental, and under these circum- 

 stances I was not surprised to learn that, in the later stages of 

 the disease, the mind generally became enfeebled. 



" The majority of the patients did not appear to me to suffer 

 any great amount of pain, and I was informed that one of the 

 characteristics of the disease was the insensibility of the flesh 

 to injury. One individual was pointed out to me whose hand 

 and arm had been allowed to rest on a nearly red-hot stove, 

 and who had never discovered the fact until attention was 

 arrested by the strong smell of the burning limb, which was 

 terribly injured." 



I never think of the haunts of the larger wild quadrupeds 

 of this region without associating them with many scenes 

 deeply impressed on my memory, of the delightful winter days 

 spent in roaming on snow shoes over the forest, or the 

 nights when under the shelter of the little hut made of pine 

 boughs, and covered over with snow, its cheerful log fire in 

 the centre, and our pallets of the softest spruce foliage, we 

 recounted the adventures of the day, or listened to the long 

 yarns of the Indian. 



How vivid come back these and like recollections ! the 

 solitude and perfect stillness of nature, only broken by the 

 twigs cracking from intense frost, the loud chattering of stray 

 squirrels, or the phantom-like form of a hare springing over 

 the snow, the dreary barren with only here and there a single 

 tree, or clump of stunted pines, the impervious alder swamp, 

 anon the dismal darkness of the forest ; now the deep impres- 



