: Cape Breton Tales by Smith Harry James Smith Edith Contributor Wiard Oliver M Illustrator - Short stories; Cape Breton Island (N.S.) Fiction

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ecame more general: young and old and middle-aged together. In Sunday boots that creaked loudly passed numbers of men and boys, sometimes five or six abreast, reaching from side to side of the street, sometimes singly attendant upon a conscious young person of the other sex. The wagons are beginning to appear now, scattering the pedestrians right and left as they rattle by, bearing whole families packed in little space; and away across the harbor, you see a small fleet of brown sails putting off from the Cape for the nearer shore.

Outside the church, in the open space before the steps, is gathered a constantly growing multitude, a dense, restless swarm of humanity, full of gossip and prognostic, until suddenly the bell stops its clangor overhead; then there is a surging up the steps and through the wide doors of the sanctuary; and outside all is quiet once more.

The Acadians do not appear greatly to relish the more solemn things of religion. They like better a religion demurely gay, pervaded by light and color.

"Elle est tr?s chic, notre petite ?glise, n'est-ce pas?" was a comment made by a pious soul of my acquaintance, eager to uphold the honor of her parish.

Proper, mild-featured saints and smiling Virgins in painted robes and gilt haloes abound in the Acadian churches; on the altars are lavish decorations of artificial flowers--silver lilies, paper roses, red and purple immortelles; and the ceilings and pillars and wall-spaces are often done in blue and pink, with gold stars; such a style, one imagines, as might appeal to our modern St. Valentine. The piety that expresses itself in this inoffensive gayety of embellishment is more akin to that which moves universal humanity to don its finery o' Sundays,--to the greater glory of God,--than to the sombre, death-remembering zeal of some other communities. A kind religion this, one not without its coquetries, gracious, tactful, irresistible, interweaving itself throughout the very texture of the common life.

Last summer, out at Petit de Grat, three miles from Arichat, where the people have just built a little church of their own, they held a "Grand Picnic and Ball" for the raising of funds with which to erect a glebe house. The priest authorized the affair, but stipulated that sunset should end each day's festivities, so that all decencies might be respected. This parish picnic started on a Monday and continued daily for the rest of the week--that is to say, until all that there was to sell was sold, and until all the youth of the vicinity had danced their legs to exhaustion.

An unoccupied shop was given over to the sale of cakes, tartines, doughnuts, imported fruits, syrup drinks , to the vending of chances on wheels of fortune, target-shooting, dice-throwing, hooked rugs, shawls, couvertures, knitted hoods, and the like; and above all the hubbub and excitement twanged the ceaseless, inevitable voice of a graphophone, reviving long-forgotten rag-time.

Outside, most conspicuous on the treeless slope of hill, was a "pavilion" of boards, bunting-decked, on which, from morn till eve, rained the incessant clump-clump of happy feet. For music there was a succession of performers and of instruments: a mouth-organ, a fiddle, a concertina, each lending its particular quality of gayety to the dance; the mouth-organ, shrill, extravagant, whimsical, failing in richness; the concertina, rich, noisy, impetuous, failing in fine shades; the fiddle, wheedling, provocative, but a little thin. And besides--the fiddle is not what it used to be in the hands of old Fortune.

Fortune died a year ago, and he was never appreciated till death snatched him from us: the skinniest, most ramshackle of mankind, tall, loose-jointed, shuffling in gait; at all other times than those that called his art into play, a shiftless, hang-dog sort of personage, who would always be begging a coat of you, or asking the gift of ten cents to buy him some tobacco. But at a dance he was a despot unchallenged. Only to hear him jig off the Irish Washerwoman was to acknowledge his pre?minence. His bleary eyes and tobacco-stained lips took on a radiance, his body rocked to and fro, vibrated to the devil-may-care rhythm of the thing, while his left foot emphatically rapped out the measure.

Until another genius shall be raised up amongst us, Fortune's name will be held in cherished memory. For that matter, it is not likely to die out, since, on the day of his death, the old reprobate was married to the mother of his seven children--baptized, married, administered, and shuffled off in a day.

It had never occurred to any of us, somehow, that Fortune might be as transitory and impermanent as his patron goddess herself. We had always accepted him as a sort of ageless thing, a living symbol, a peripatetic mortal, coming out of Petit de Grat, and going about, tobacco in cheek, fiddle under arm, as irresponsible as mirth itself among the sons of men. God rest him! Another landmark gone.

And old Maximen For?t, too, from whom one used to take weather-wisdom every day--his bench out there in the sun is empty. Maximen's shop was just across the street from our house--a long, darkish, tunnel-like place under a steep roof. Tinware of all descriptions hung in dully shining array from the ceiling; barrels and a rusty stove and two broad low counters occupied most of the floor space, and the atmosphere was charged with a curious sharp odor in which you could distinguish oil and tobacco and molasses. The floor was all dented full of little holes, like a honeycomb, where Maximen had walked over it with his iron-pointed crutch; for he was something of a cripple. But you rarely had any occasion to enter the smelly little shop, for no one ever bought much of anything there nowadays.

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