When madame begins to stop in front of cottage gates to pay out of her deep pocket the proceeds of each morning sale and we hand out to eager hands the right number of lard tins going to repeat their mission as berry containers, to our minds nothing is wanting in the Romance which weaves itself about the scene and the figure of the old cart and its mistress.
But we must not ride forever in this mountain-climbing and thrifty “hope of the hills”. Other carts are calling. Let us drift down stream on the bosom of the St. Lawrence, far out where it is “The Gulf”, away past Prince Edward Island to the Magdalens. In this corner of Quebec the two-wheel cart is practically the only means of land transportation. These Island carts, like the islands themselves, overflow with originality and character. They are soft and full of the sea’s wetness as they come toward us along the treeless, island-landscape. We notice, too, a difference in the horse. The Magdalens cart is drawn by an island pony. Mares are accompanied by shaggy colts, all legs, running beside the mothers, or following behind the cart, noses over the tail-board. When the load is a long mackerel boat going into winter quarters, after a season’s fishing on a distant beach, it is indeed a strange procession, the up-hill-and-down road causing it now to heave in sight and now to disappear as if the boat still rode the mobile crests and valleys of the Gulf.
But the most romantic of all the carts is the procession across the long barachois, a winding procession crossing the sands--cart after cart--a Canadian caravan of the desert. All sorts of weird and bizarre shapes of dusk and distance and creeping sea-fog add to the romance of this strange train.
What takes the caravan into the desert? Not the trade in rich silks and carpets of far eastern looms or the bringing of precious stones from one mart to another, but a trade just the same--an individual and romantic trade peculiar to the Magdalens--the culling of the clam, the tiny, hard, white mollusc with as pretty lights in it as the pearl when it comes wet from the underseas sand-home out there where the wet sea-fog begins in the eye of the wind.
One may think the path-finding lead-cart of this caravan has nothing to do. But try to find your own way across these sands and you will soon be glad to follow along behind any old cart that heaves in sight, even if it is navigated by an old cow in harness. Out here the sea-wind licks up the sand and fills in and levels off landmarks just as the Scirocco levels off the shifting dunes of old Egypt.