matter, the people of the
Hunting Quarter and Cedar Island section are not very greatly changed in
their manners and customs from those of their forebears of many
generations ago. Grouped in small settlements of just a few houses each,
they live there to-day after the fashion of those same forebears in
almost every detail. The houses are the same or at least they are
carefully patterned after those built by the first settlers so many
generations ago.

There is no doubt concerning the ancestry of these folk. A little
conversation with the natives is enough to make one realize that he is
listening here to a speech redolent of the days of Chaucer, a speech
richly flavored with the colloquialisms of the Elizabethan era. Some of
the familiar folk-lore tales might well have emanated from the poet
himself, both for their language and their spirit.

And these descendants of an early English stock have preserved not only
the ancient speech, but they have maintained the generous courtesy of a
former time, when Sir Walter Raleigh spread his mantle in the mire in
order that his queen might pass dry shod. And real courtesy includes
always an unhesitating and ungrudging hospitality. The dwellers in this
isolated region are surpassed by none in their warm welcome of any
wayfarer who may come to them.

They have no highway or railroad connection with the outside world. The
only means is voyaging by small boats, a method necessarily slow at the
best, and often quite impossible. It is claimed that good roads and the
railways are essential factors in the education of any community, and
the claim is, doubtless, just. But it would be well, perhaps, if some of
those who boast of their education were to be cast among these
illiterates, there to gain a new appreciation of their own language,
shorn of its modern barbarities and the atrocities of slang. It is a
curious fact that many of these persons who can neither read nor write,
nevertheless, possess a vocabulary beyond that of many a grammar-school
graduate. Schools have been few and far between in this lonely place.
Yet the very isolation has tended to preserve the purity of the local
speech.

To-night the inhabitants of the settlement are resting upon their tiny
porches, for the air is over-warm and only the slightest bit of breeze
is stirring. What little there is of it comes from the forest hard by,
and brings with it a plague of numberless mosquitoes. Because of them a
huge smudge