UNIVERSITY COURIER.
9
harbor at the end was a sorry conclusion. It was more dispiriting than Kansas City seven years ago in the vicinity of the old station; everywhere dirt, saloons, red-faced men, low tumble-down buildings, confusion, neglect and unthrift to the last degree, and it was nearly night of a scorching July day. Despair is a good spur, when there is any beyond at all. In that town we could not stay, as we had planned, else we should not have risked such an adventure as to start at dusk for a ride of seventeen miles to the village of Malpeque on the north coast of the Island. Some fellow passengers on the boat had mentioned it as a spot to which travellers sometimes strayed, a little out of the way village on the shore, where there was no hotel, no shelter but farmhouses. There was no railroad or stage, but secretly delighted with the romance of the situation, we discovered a man who would drive us over that night, and from some Summerside dignitary to whom we had letters we had the name of a farmer who might receive us.
Occasionally, before the rather rough ride was over, it occurred to us as being a singular escapade. It was very dark and rather late, and suppose the farmer's house should be full! Romance had time to grow sober before we stopped at the door, but it revived when after a little discourse with our driver, a tall serious Scotchman welcomed us "to the best he had," and we stepped in to his parlor, very thankful for shelter. But downfall of dreams! No sanded floor, no quaint settle, we stepped on a Brussels carpet with greens and reds as hideous as we had left in "the States." On the table lay a photograph album, and around the room was a row of stiff hair-cloth mahogany chairs. It was one of the surprises of a lifetime.
The next day the mystery was solved. A fishing and hunting party from Boston had happened on the spot a few years before, and coming summer by summer had made it gradually worth while for the farmer to add a sort of boarding-house extension to his original home hence the carpet, and the album.
But the original house remained, and was with all its belongings a perfect study of American life fifty or a hundred years ago. Whether we were waking or sleeping we could hardly tell, as we went out to the great dairy where butter and cheese were made, or into the spinning room in another extension, where all the cloth for the family was spun and woven, saw the mother and daughters of the house milk the cows while the men sat on the doorstep, and heard the young men sing, as their mildest diversion at their work, the Scotch version of the Psalms of David.
The farm houses were widely scattered. Sunday was the only day of recreation or the meeting of neighbors. They came on that day from many miles in all directions tying their horses in a little grove by the church, and enduring a service which began at ten and was continued after an hour's intermission from one till three. It was a purely Scotch settlement, no musical instruments were allowed in the church, and a nasal tone was evidently an essential sign of grace in the heart, the leader of the choir holding them to the pitch by prolonging the closing note of each verse till they should strike in on the next. The faces of the men were hard and weather-beaten. The women and children showed how little room for tenderness, or comfort, or beauty their lives held. Shrewd and canny, but not gracious
or lovely, it was a gnarled and stinted growth, sad to remember.
But Malpeque with its winding red ribbon roads, and evergreen forests, its bracing, delicious air, its month of glorious sunshine that was never too warm, its stretch of grand seashore was a bit of paradise bright to remember.
We were loth to leave it and lingered till there was time left for only one more exploration, a sail up the river St. John. Prince Edward's Island had seemed remote and fresh, but when we had sailed for hours up the river, north into the very heart of the "forest primeval" from the city of St. Johns, we had the full sense of discovery. The river was broad and deep, reminding us sometimes of the Hudson and sometimes of the St. Lawrence. There are no towns on the shore, only little settlements, no wharves at which the boat may touch, but at intervals, it slowly stopped in mid stream and sounded a whistle. At the signal a canoe darted out from the wooded banks, with baskets of produce, perhaps, and one or two passengers who came on board. Then on and on again into the wilderness, meeting huge lumber rafts floating down to the city and the sea, and now and then stopping to whistle for the mysterious, silent, little canoes.
It was all even more like a bewitching dream than Malpeque, and made us wish we might always explore and never go back to the regular round of things, which we however proceeded to do as fast as the next day's steamer would carry us, the invalid on the high road to health again, and all sure the very next summer should take us back for Nova Scotia, the home of Evangeline, and all the other wonderful places that summer missed.
E. T. S.
NORMAL.
The actions of our Legislature this winter, as regards the State University, have been watched with much eagerness and some anxiety by the students, as well as the friends of this institution. But perhaps no class has watched with so much interest as the members of the Normal department.
As the Legislature convened, the hearts of those about to graduate beat high with the hope that after this the diplomas issued to graduates from this department would become life certificates, the same as diplomas granted by the Emporia Normal. But the Legislature, biased or unbiased by the advice of lobbyists, and those interested in other institutions, 'sat down' on the measure. Then the grave discussions, as to the propriety of removing the Normal department from here to Emporia filled many of the Normalites with consternation. And when the House bill was introduced, reducing the salary of the Dean of the Normal department to $1,000 per annum, it bore the appearance of a scheme to annihilate this branch of the University by stratagem. And the many ungenerous, and unstatesmanlike expressions which this measure called forth from the opponents, or rather enemies of the institution cannot be justified by any rules of fairness or good breeding. It is to be regretted that any legislator should be betrayed into hasty and bitter remarks which can even be construed as emenating from narrow or biased views.
There may be good reasons for removing the University Normal to Emporia. Perhaps the course of instruc-