The Beaulacs belong to a tribe of French Canadians that has peopled half the countryside. They have various nicknames—Black Jack, Little Joe, Yankee Jim, Big John, Rose Marie, Marie John, and so on. The Little Jack Beaulacs live at Loon Bay, round the point and three miles away. The road to Loon Lake Station starts at their landing. They live in a barn, a sixteen-by-twenty-foot log structure, banked with earth to keep out the cold. In its one room, along with a double bed, a cooking stove, table, sideboard, sewing machine, rocking chair, boxes, pots and pans, and a clutter of harness and old junk of all kinds, live John and Rose and the six young Beaulacs, beginning with sixteen-year-old Louis and ending with the baby. There is one door and a small window, that, so far as I know, has never been opened. In summer, when the door is left ajar, the room is apt to be further inhabited by hens, ducks, cats, and even a lamb or two.

The house stands in a clearing on a perfectly bare hill, but in summer, the whole slope is golden with sheets of tansy, and the small dug-out milk house is shaded by a giant lilac bush, sole remnant of some long-forgotten garden. At the foot of the hill, rotting, flat-bottomed boats wallow in the mud, and there the little Beaulacs spend happy days fishing for mudcats, wading for frogs, screaming, wrangling, and throwing stones into the water.

They have not always lived in a barn. They have had two other houses, each burned to the ground, with all the pitiful furnishings it contained—crushing blows to people as poor as the Beaulacs. After the last fire they moved into the barn, the only shelter left standing, intending to build again in the spring. But log-hauling is work, building materials cost money, and time went on. Now they have settled down contentedly in the barn, and will stay there, I doubt not, until this roof falls down about their heads. They have no fear of another fire. That would be impossible, for, as one of the children tells me, the last one happened on the full of the moon—sure sign that they can never be burned out again.Like other men of the settlement, John Beaulac works at the mica mine, hunts, fishes, and farms a bit. Rose walks barefoot over the fields, after the plow, digs the small garden, raises chickens, picks wild berries, and sells frogs to the summer campers, contriving thus to supply the few clothes and groceries needed. For the rest, they live a happy, carefree life in the open, and the young Beaulacs scramble up somehow.

Rose handles the boxes of supplies that come from Toronto for the island, driving them in from Loon Lake and bringing them across the lake by wagon or boat, as the time of the year permits. Last time she refused, very firmly, to allow me to pay for that hauling.

“We ain’t agoin’ to tax you nothin’,” she declared.

When I expostulated, she only shook her frowsy head more violently.

“No,” she said, “we do it fer you fer nothin’. It ain’t like you had a man here to do fer you,” she reasoned.

Then she looked at her own man with pride and at me with a vast pity, because I had no man to work myself to death for.In a pioneer neighborhood, where every woman must have some man, however worthless, to hew the wood and care for the stock, and where every man must have some woman, to cook and to keep the house, however lazy a slattern she may be, I, who live alone, pay for my wood and draw the water, must be a creature not to be understood.

Yesterday the Beaulacs invited me to go with them to the races in Henderson’s Bay—a trying out of the neighborhood horses before the yearly races to be held at Queensport next week. Scrambling and falling down the slippery trail, in answer to their halloo, I found a straw-filled wagon body set on runners and drawn by Beaulac’s old mare. She, not having been “sharp shod,” slipped and slid, threatening to break a leg at every step, while the wagon slewed from side to side over the ice. It was the first time that I had driven over a lake. My heart was in my mouth all the way.

Henderson’s Bay, a long arm of Many Islands, stretches for a mile into the land. It is a beautiful horseshoe, with the farm house at the toe. The course was laid out on the dull green ice, little cedar bushes set up to mark the quarter miles. An old reaper, frozen in near the shore, served as the judges’ stand.

We drew up at the side of the track, in the lee of a high rock that somewhat sheltered us from the piercing wind. It was a friendly scene. The encircling arms of the shore stretched round and seemed to gather us close. The smoke from the house chimneys curled up to the low-leaning gray sky, and Henderson’s herd, led by a dignified old bull, strolled down over the hill as though to see the race. Far away on the ice, black spots appeared, later discerned to be fast-moving buggies, sleighs, and wagons coming to the meet. When they were all assembled there must have been as many as seven vehicles. There were four horses to be tried. They were harnessed in turn to a little two-wheeled affair called a bike. There is only one “bike” here, so no two horses could run at a time, and there had to be a great unhitching and harnessing again after every trial of speed. Joe Boggs, the neighborhood jockey, drove with arms and legs all spraddled out, like a spider, and urged on his poor steeds with wild cries of: “Hi-hi-hi-hi”—enough to frighten a sensible horse to death.I have never beheld a more professional looking horseman than Mr. Boggs. His disreputable old squirrel-skin cap, that hung off the back of his head, his high boots, the bow of his legs, the squint of his eye, even the way he chewed a straw between races, bespoke the true jockey. One felt that if Joe Boggs could not put a horse over the track, no one could.

Rose Beaulac too was a keen judge of a horse. She criticized the entries unsparingly—Rose, with her long, dry-looking coon skin coat, and her dirty red “tuque” cocked over one eye.

“That old mare,” she would say, cuttingly, “I knowed her in her best days, and then she wasn’t much.”

That settled the mare for us. Our money was not on her.

There was, however, one horse that she did consider worth praise. She told me with awe that his owner had refused four hundred dollars for him—a staggering sum. So valued was this animal that he was not to be allowed to run any more until the Queensport races, but when it was learned that I wished to admire him, his owner consented to put him once round the course, for my pleasure.After the contestants had each done his best—or worst—the meet broke up, with many “Good-days” and “Come-overs,” and we drove back over the ice, the old mare plunging and sliding along seemingly quite accustomed to being driven, at a gallop, over a sheet of glass.

The eye swept the outline of the shore on which stand the seven homesteads of this arm of the lake. Each roof shelters a family of a different race and creed. Many Islands is a type of the whole of this strong, young country, that takes in men of all lands and minds, gives them her fertile prairies almost for the asking, and makes them over into good Canadians.

There are the Blakes, from “The States,” and aggressively American; the Jacksons, Canadian born and Methodist; the Hendersons, English and Church of England; the McDougals, Scotch and Presbyterian; the Cassidys, Irish and Catholic; Harry Sprig-gins, a sharp-faced little London cockney; and the Beaulacs, true French Canadian. Once in a while a Swede wanders in and hires out for the wood-cutting, or an Indian comes along through the lakes in his canoe, and camps for awhile on one of the islands. Amid all the differences of belief and the clash of temperament, the people manage to be friendly and neighborly; the children play together; the young folk marry, and the next generation is all Canadian.

They all speak English, but when one stops to listen, literal translations of idioms and queer turns of phrase stand out. Foret always speaks of a “little, small” bird or tree or what not, and for him things are always “perfectly all right.”

“Do yer moind thot pig, I sold Black Jack?” asks Uncle Dan Cassidy.

“’Ow har you to-d’y?” inquires Harry Spriggins.

“Oh, not too bad,” answers John Beaulac. “Pas trop mal,” he is saying, of course.

When John has finished a job he stands off, hands in pockets, and observes: “That iss now ahl bunkum sah.” After a moment’s pondering one knows that “Bon comme Ça” is what he means.

They speak of coming home through the “Brooly.” That is the scrub wood through which a forest fire once swept. It is the land “brulÉ”—burned over. While they live in Canada their talk is of far away lands, and it is to the “Old Country” that they mean to return some day.

And from the house on the island I see the life go by—the stern, bare life of the country—with its never-ending toil, its uncounted sacrifices, its feuds, its ready charities and the piteous, unnecessary sufferings of the sick. Blessed be the rural telephone, lately come to Many Islands, that has made it possible for Dr. LeBaron to reach a patient the day he is called. Thrice blessed the tinkle of those little bells that bring the voices of the world to the farms, shut in behind the snowdrifts. To the women, dulled with labor and shaken with loneliness, they are the little bells of courage.

I stopped at a farm the other day—a very lonely place. Scarce were the first greetings over when the young mistress of the house said, proudly: “We have the telephone here. Would you care to talk to any of your friends?”

Something in her tone, the eager shining of her eyes, brought a rush of tears to my own. It was the supreme effort of hospitality. She was offering me the thing that had meant life itself to her, the dear privilege of speaking with a friend.