124 OVER ON THE ISLAND

quite at home. They enjoyed our fish. We enjoyed the stories of their fish, which, somehow or other, had always got away.

“He was a beauty, speckled, y’know, and about this long. . . .”

His arms described a large semi-circle which should have done ample credit to the proportions of a medium— size whale. We nodded politely. For we remem- bered that ones of similar proportions had just barely escaped us.

“That one’s done, ” remarked the son.

Gradually we swung the conversation away from fish—they were eaten, anyway—to the other pursuits of the Village.

“Don’t know much about the place,” confessed the father. “We’re from Charlottetown. Just came out here to fish.”

“To eat fish!” I corrected mentally.

“ Have they a library here?”

“I think they have at Murray Harbour. Heavens! What a blessing it must be to these people away down here—cut off as they are from the main channel of traffic.”

“ And yet some people say that Islanders don’t read.”

“Well, do they?” Jean inquired doubtfully.

“They certainly read, all right, but they don’t believe very much in buying books. Look at the number of book stores on the Island, and their reserve shelves!”

“Just imagine what an outcry there would be if the libraries were taken away . .”

It was a wonderful experiment. And through it, a “foreigner, ” Andrew Carnegie, engraved his name indelibly in the Island hall of fame—the memory of a grateful people. He was interested, he said, not so