held in rather than driven; he is a good roadster, anyway, as you will find while the day wears on, for the few people of Deer Island who keep horses, most of them being quite Venetian in their allegiance to boats, are proud of the fact that they keep only good stock.
Leonardville lies perhaps a mile back. It is a small village, as already described, comprising only about forty-three houses in all,—a still pleasant place, with an air of having passed middle life and retired comfortably on a neat income. No wonder it looks out so complacently from its seclusion; it is parent to more than one personality that is active and honored out in the big world.
The Deer Island customs house, a cute little building, scarcely bigger than an ordinary-sized room, was situated at Leonardville, but it has recently been changed into a dwelling-house. A busy place it used to be, for not a boatload of groceries nor one of the packages brought from the shops of Eastport or Lubec could be introduced into the homes of Deer Island without its share of duty. It is interesting just here to note that shopping in the United States is considered by West Isle people to pay in spite of duties.
The residents are mostly fisherfolk, not in the ordinary meaning of the word, however. A fisherman of Deer Island is generally an educated, refined, and usually "well to do" person, who owns or shares in the ownership of a sardine weir and is employer to several boatmen whose business it is to gather in the trapped fish and transfer them to the factories at Lubec and Eastport. Several of these weirs are situated close to Leonardville, one under a high bank a little way to the south, the others grouped around a narrow strip of land that appeared yesterday to be a long arm of Deer Island crooked around the harbor, but is now a mere thread of rockbound green beyond a ten-minute row over the waves of an incoming tide. The dry bar which connected them yesterday and which lends its name of Bar Island to the "thread of green" lies now beneath water of sufficient depth to allow a moderately large steamer to pass over it in safety. Some of the weirs can be discovered readily, though the tall piles that enclose them are nearly submerged. You can trace their fencelike outlines by the brush that is interwoven between the piles to keep the fish from swimming out.
Just beyond Leonardville the road curves to the left around the brow of the high hill that rises so abruptly behind the village, and after forming a wide detour swings inward across the island. Another highway, however, continues by a sharp turn to the right past the inner angle of a beautiful sheet of water nearly landlocked and banked by steep grass-covered slopes that is known as Northwest Harbor, and so on toward Richardson and the northern end of the island. The view from the head of the harbor is especially fine. The harbor is long, crooked, and rather narrow, and has a margin of sheer wooded banks that end in two precipitous bluffs a mile away, between which you catch a glimpse of Fundy and sundry islets.
It is up hill and down for a short time and then suddenly a bit of level country opens up at the foot of one of the briefer inclines where you are still one hundred and fifty feet above the sea, and there just beyond a bend of the road lies the
