Down North and Up Along 
surroundings were squalid and unsightly, with- 
out a touch of picturesqueness. We found a 
woman there, a gaunt woman who talked her 
French ■patois with the vivacity of her race. 
She was the mother of little children, one a 
young babe. It certainly looked as if the 
family would have to subsist upon stones 
during the winter. And yet she talked with 
vivacity. That is what it is to be French. 
These people, we learned later, were descend- 
ants of the Acadians. They themselves did 
not know it, nor how they came to be among 
English-speaking people. They had lost all 
tradition of themselves. They only knew that 
they had just come from islands in the north, 
where life was too hard even for them, be- 
cause there was no wood there. 
As we went on, it looked as though all the 
beauty had been left behind. Ahead of us lay 
a straight blue wall, of which we at times 
caught glimpses. It appeared to cut off the 
way to the north ; it rose up ever and anon 
menacing and mysterious. Did we pass be- 
yond it ? And what then ? What was there 
to be seen in this unpeopled and ever increas- 
ingly dreary wilderness ? 
274 
