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There were potatoes, which the habitant called palates and not pommes de terre, but they were almost a rarity until the closing days of the Old Régime. Wild fruits, chiefly raspberries, blueberries, and wild grapes, grew in abundance among the foothills and were gathered in great quantities every summer.
Once Romney had written a sonnet to them in which he compared their colour to ripe blueberries. This may not sound poetical to you unless you know or remember just what the tints of ripe blueberries are dusky purple in some lights, clear slate in others, and yet again in others the misty hue of early meadow violets. "You really look very well," remarked the real Lucinda to the mirrored Lucinda.
Although blueberries grew on every hillside, we never found strawberries, such as the Russians in Urga gather on the Bogdo-ol, and only one patch of raspberries on a burned-off mountain slope. But the currants were delicious when smothered in sugar.
Our fellows looked capable of any kindness to their wards short of letting them go. They were a most friendly company, with an effect of picnicking there among the sweet-fern and blueberries, where they had pitched their wooden tents with as little disturbance to the shrubbery as possible. One always accepts the apologies of a man with a Gatling gun to back them, and I retreated.
The explanation was that in the rarefied atmosphere of interior Labrador distances are very deceptive; when George reported that the "big water" was three miles ahead it must have been fully fifteen. On the 5th, while crossing the barrens we came upon some blueberries and after eating our fill we were able to gather enough to supply each man with a big dish of them for supper.
The melons here are delicious, and we have had buckwheat cakes, and rice cakes, and sweet potatoes, and blueberries. The living here is very good, and nothing can be more comfortable than we are; but the flies are sometimes an annoyance, and the darkness of the rooms which are kept dark to prevent their getting in.
The voyage from San Francisco is almost all the way in sight of land; and as you skirt the mountainous coast of Oregon you see long stretches of forest, miles of tall firs killed by forest fires, and rearing their bare heads toward the sky like a vast assemblage of bean-poles a barren view which you owe to the noble red man, who, it is said, sets fire to these great woods in order to produce for himself a good crop of blueberries.
Here it was, on this level bottom-land, that I first tasted what are, I think, next to honey, of all wild things the greatest treat that a bear knows ripe blueberries. But this "berry-path," as we called it, was to play a very important part in my life, and I must explain. We had soon learned that we were now almost in the middle of men.
With this supper we had some of the blueberries stewed, and Hubbard said they would have been the "real thing if we only had a little sugar for them." All day on September 10th we continued our search for the connection with Michikamau, finally directing our course to the southwest where a mountain seemed to offer a view of the waters in that direction.
Some were hinds on neighbouring farms, but most were shepherds, for there was now very little tillage. Almost all the land formerly cultivated had been given up to grass and sheep, and not a little of it was steadily returning to that state of nature from which it had been reclaimed, producing heather, ling, blueberries, cnowperts, and cranberries.
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