be exciting and rather cold. She thought so too. Did she come from
Charlottetown? No. Out Tignish way? Yes; halfway from Charlottetown to
Tignish. Queen's County? Good apple country? Yes, she never saw such
good apples as they raise in Queen's County. When I volunteered the
opinion that the weather on Prince Edward Island is fine but changeable,
I was received on the footing of an old inhabitant.

I did not find it necessary to go to the limits of my knowledge. I had
still several reserve facts, classified in the Encyclopaedia under the
heads, Geology, Administration, and Finance. I had established my
position as a superior person with an intuitive knowledge of Prince
Edward Island. If the Encyclopaedia itself had walked into the kitchen
arm in arm with the Classical Dictionary, she could not have been more
impressed. At least, that is the way I like to think she felt. It is the
way I feel under similar circumstances.

One watches the Superior Person leading a conversation with the
admiration due to Browning's Herve Riel, when,

As its inch of way were the wide sea's profound,

he steered the ship in the narrow channel. It is well, however, for one
who undertakes such feats to make sure that he really has an inch of
way; it is none too much.

In these days it is so easy for one to get a supply of ready-made
knowledge that it is hard to keep from applying it indiscriminately. We
make incursions into our neighbor's affairs and straighten them out with
a ruthless righteousness which is very disconcerting to him, especially
when he has never had the pleasure of our acquaintance till we came to
set him right. There is a certain modesty of conscience which would
perhaps be more becoming. It comes only with the realization of
practical difficulties. I like the remark of Sir Fulke Greville in his
account of his friend, Sir Philip Sydney. Speaking of his literary
labors he says: "Since my declining age it is true I had for some years
more leisure to discover their imperfections than care and industry to
mend them, finding in myself what all men complain of: that it is more
easy to find fault, excuse, or tolerate, than to examine or reform."

The idea that we know what a person ought to do, and especially what he
ought not to do, before we know the person or how he is situated, is one
dear to the mind of the Doctrinaire. If his mind did not naturally work
that way he would not be a Doctrinaire. He is always inclined