nce au Diable, locally known as "Lancy
Jobble." In this place there is a "medicine man," with methods unique
in science. He is the seventh son of a seventh son, and his healing
powers are reputed to be little short of miraculous. Legend has it
that such must never request payment for services, nor must the
patient ever thank him, lest the efficacy of the cure be nullified. He
is an unselfish man, a thorough believer in his own "gift"; and last
summer, for instance, right in the middle of the fishing season, he
walked thirty miles through swamp and marsh ridden with black flies,
to see a sick woman who desired his aid. Doubtless the spell of his
buoyant personality does bring comfort and relief. In the adjoining
settlement of Bareneed lives an enormously fat old woman of
seventy-odd summers. Life passes over her, and its only effect is to
make her rotund and unwieldy. When the sick come to Brother Luke for
treatment, if any of the few drugs which he has accumulated chance to
have lost their labels--a not uncommon contingency in this land of
mist and fog--he takes down a likely-looking bottle from the shelf,
and tries a dose of the contents on this Mrs. Goochy--and awaits
results. If nothing untoward transpires, he then passes the medicine
on to the patient. Mrs. Goochy has a strong acquisitive bias, and
raises no objections to this vicarious proceeding. She argues: "I
doesn't need 'un now, but there be's no tellin'. I may need 'un when I
can't get 'un."

[Illustration: THE SEVENTH SON]

Occasionally the sailing is not so smooth. While we were there the
doctor saw a case of a woman from whom this AEsculapius had attempted
to extract an offending molar, his only instrument being a kind of
miniature winch which screws on to the undesired tooth. Its action
proved so prompt and powerful that not only did it remove the tooth
intended, but four others as well, and the entire alveolar process
connected with them.

[Illustration: ITS ACTION WAS PROMPT AND POWERFUL]

It often made me feel ashamed to find how much some of these people
have made of their meagre opportunities. At one house a mother told me
that she had only been able to go to school for six months when she
was a girl, yet she had taught herself to read, and later her
children also. She showed me most interesting articles which she had
written for a Canadian newspaper describing the life on Le Petit Nord.
She often had to sit up until two in the morning to kn