The conditions prevailing among some of the people at the north end of Newfoundland and of Labrador itself should not be confused with those of their neighbours to the southward. Chronic poverty is, however, very far from being universally prevalent in the northern district. Some of the fishermen lead a comfortable, happy, and prosperous life; but my old diaries, as well as my present observations, furnish all too many instances in which families exist well within the danger-line of poverty, ignorance, and starvation. The privations which the inhabitants of the French or Treaty shore and of Labrador have had to undergo, and their isolation from so many of the benefits of civilization, have had varying effects on the residents of the coast to-day. While a resourceful and kindly, hardy and hospitable people have been developed, yet one sometimes wonders exactly into what era an inhabitant of say the planet Mars would place our section of the North Country if he were to alight here some crisp morning in one of his unearthly machines. For we are a reactionary people in matters of religion and education; and our very "speech betrays us," belonging as so many of its expressions do to the days when the Pilgrims went up to Canterbury, or a certain Tinker wrote of another and more distant pilgrimage to the City of Zion. The people are, naturally, Christians of a devout and simple faith. The superstitions still found among them are attributable to the remoteness of the country from the current of the world's thought, the natural tendency of all seafaring people, and the fact that the days when the forbears of these fishermen left "Merrie England" to seek a living by the harvest of the sea, and finally settled on these rocky shores, were those when witches and hobgoblins and charms and amulets were accepted beliefs. Nevertheless, to-day as a medical man one is startled to see a fox's or wolf's head suspended by a cord from the centre, and to learn that it will always twist the way from which the wind is going to blow. One man had a barometer of this kind hanging from his roof, and explained that the peculiar fact was due to the nature of the animals, which in life always went to windward of others; but if you had a seal's head similarly suspended, it would turn from the wind, owing to the timid character of that creature. Moreover, it surprises one to be assured, on the irrefutable and quite unquestioned authority of "old Aunt Anne Sweetapple," that aged cats always become playful before a gale of wind comes on. "I never gets sea boils," one old chap told me the other day. "How is that?" I asked. "Oh! I always cuts my nails on a Monday, so I never has any."