BELLEORAM.
PATH END.
So little are these sea-coast folk inland travellers, that there is often no road from one village to another, entrance and exit always being accomplished over the sea; by boat or steamer.
Settling down in any of these villages is to be constantly entertained by the variety of scenes afforded by the life. Early in the morning “the fish-boats” are under weigh with their tanned sails and homemade oars creaking against the pin. Later, the women go about their household duties, studying “the signs of the weather” from door or window. The old ’longshoremen open the fish-house doors and potter about with old ropes and picturesque “killicks” or homemade anchors, heavy, smooth stones held together in skeleton-frames of old bits of wood and a lashing of odd pieces of wire-rigging salvaged from some old wreck. But all the time, the men, like the women, have their weather-eye centred on the “signs of the mornin’.” For the day’s work, is—the fish.
The first peep of sunlight through the gray clouds or the fog, sees men, women and children, on the “fish stages”, as the platforms are called, fish in hand. In the afternoon, the scene is reversed, with each “hand” driving hard to get the fish in again before night.
A cloud, during the day, sees the ever-watchful women coming on the run from all quarters to get the fish in before it rains. Codfish must not get wet.
The Newfoundlanders are especially happy in the place-names they have given to their towns, villages and “outports”. Sea-folk are always, more or less, noted for romantic place-names. So, in summer, adventuring in Newfoundland, such names as Push-through, Thoroughfare, Come-by-Chance, Seldom-Come-By, Step-Aside, Happy Adventure, Heart’s Delight, Heart’s Content, Path End, write themselves indelibly in your memory map. Especially appropriate are the names given to the mountains. To realize the full beauty of some of these peak-names, one must fancy Newfoundland as a “ship”, the surface as the deck. Then one has the viewpoint of the men who sponsored these in baptism. Then, the single peaks, springing up tall against the sky, have a beautiful psychology of their own. Here is “The Gaff Topsail”, “The Main Topsail”, “The Mizzen Topsail”, “The Fore-Topsail”. Collectively they are referred to, picturesquely enough, as, “The Tops’ls”. Other individual peaks are “Blow-me-Down”, a sort of challenge to the elements and, “The Butter-Pot”, a maritime concession to the menu of maritime cabin-tables.
The surface of Newfoundland, its rocks and hills, is at its best in the fall of the year when the brush of Autumn paints all the foliage and fruit of the Bake-Apple, Partridge-Berries, wild red and black currants, Rowan berries, etc., gorgeous yellows, reds and browns. After the frost, the “marshes and barrens” afford miles of colour.