The following family names appear in this letter: COFFIN, DAVIS, KING, LACEY, MOORE, PEACH, REYNOLDS, and SMALLWOOD. As before, the symbol "[?]" immediately following the last letter of a word indicates that we are uncertain about that word. The same symbol with a space on both sides of it indicates that an illegible word or phrase has been omitted.
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P.S. It seems that at 92 I'm even gabbier than ever.
Result of 40 years of teaching? Or just inherited from Mom?
Thanks for the math[?] [?] too
                                                                        Monday, Oct. 16, 1995
                                                                        Beautiful day, but cooling expected

Dear Bruce and Mary:

            Last weekend and today I have been really swamped by correspondence from near and far. For instance I had a letter from the lady of the house (farm) in Rockbeare, Devon, where James (1749 – 1834), the ancestor of all the Newfoundland REYNOLDS and their numerous progeny, was born in the autumn of 1749. Like many a younger brother he had to seek his own fortune. At 19 he took a chance and came over to Nfld. Indentured as an apprentice to the boot-making LACEYs of Mully's Cove, C.B.*1, who had come earlier to make boots for the fishermen along the “North Shore”, boots similar to the boots worn by the fishermen of the West Country (Dorset, Devon, Cornwall). He was accompanying a shipment of leather to them, almost certainly by the firm where he had learned bootmaking. However, for years he kept in touch with Nicholas, his elder brother and the heir to the farm. I had written to the present owners in the very, very slim chance that some letters had survived in trunks or closets. Of course they had not, but the lady gave me the address of the keeper of records at St. Mary's Church where our James was baptized in Jan. 1750. So I'll be writing again.

            And I heard not only from my three surviving brothers (Ralph & Ben in Ct. and Ray in Cal.*2), but from four cousins in the U.S. and Nfld. (from Ft. Pierce, Fla. to Small Point and Salmon Cove in Nfld.). I don't know how long these 92-year old fingers will hold out not how legible my handwriting will be next year!

            Now much thanks for your letter and for lending me the old map. I will return it soon. I was particularly interested in the hard-to-read names down at the tip of the Northern Peninsula. You see, my mother and her cousin Evie[?] at 15 or 16 went down in one or two summers to cook for their fathers' and uncles' fishing crews at their “room” at Carpoon. She did this as I was the oldest by nearly 6 years & stayed up with her while she hooked mats (rugs).*3 Mother had a fantastic memory and told me in great detail about their adventures and trips to several places on the map. But I could not find Carpoon which, I gathered, was just north of Hare Bay. Carpoon was the Nfld pronunciation of the French Quirpon. Tradition reports that this was the first landfall of Jacques Cartier on the venture westward from the harbor of St. Malo in France. Quirpon was the name of the last village he saw on leaving St. Malo and heading for the open sea. Among the several reasons for French names up there and down along the real west coast to Port aux Basques was the 1783 treaty which gave the French fishing rights in that area but not on the east coast where West Country fishermen had settled. But this treaty was signed after both French & English & Portuguese had fished for many years on the east coast. The sourthern coast of Nfld opposite the Grand Banks was called the “west” coast from a very early period simply because to get to it from St. John's, one had to round Cape St. Mary's and sail due west in the direction of Port aux Basques on Cabot Strait.

            Now off the map to your letter. As you know from your search and the older people, tuberculosis was a scourge in Nfld. My grandmother was “the survivor” of the LACEY family for whom my ancestor had worked. Her third son, James, died of TB at 27, but that was because he got pneumonia in the cold damp mines of NS*4. For some reason it “developed” into TB and he came home to die. His father Nicholas “caught” it and died a few years later but again Grandma survived to a good old age, living with her youngest son, the Rev Dr. Jesse Lacey REYNOLDS (named for his dead uncle). Actually I know of very few children dying of TB before they reached their teens. The scourges of the young in my day (1903-23) there were diphtheria, whooping cough and measles and [?] smallpox. Bill PEACH[?] , one of my “gang” did but he caught it from an older brother who also came home to die.*5. The only son of our next door neighbor, the same age as my brother George (b. 1908), died of diphtheria, while not one of us [?] boys next door caught it, thus making his mother very displeased with God. Incidentally, victims of infectious diseases were then buried at night. Little Edison*6 was buried in the rain on a moonless night. George and I watched through the panes of our front door as the burial procession moved away—two miles to Blackhead churchyard (before we got our own in about 1915 *7).

            I really had to smile at the end of your quotation from George Gilbert KING: “I don't think I would have passed today seeing as how there is so much opposition to the metric system.” Only last week I read how the metric system had really been accepted in England. As soon as that tunnel was completed under the Channel, “foreign notions were sure to creep in with it, whether there was a European Community” or not. The days of Nelson and Wellington are gone forever, but I had contemporaries in school who were named for them. (And the first girl I “adored” at Salem*8 was named Rowena after the blonde Saxon lady who was the rival of Rebecca the blackhaired Jewess in Scott's Ivanhoe which my [?] Mother had read in school.)

            I suppose you have a current map of Nfld. The road built into Buchans for the mine there was continued on south to Belleoram of the south coast west of Fortune Bay.*9 know about this because it enabled a Belleoram girl to find her way to the U.S. and teach in Maine and marry a colleague of mine at the U of Maine. Mina COFFIN and we lived near each other and visited to swap stories of “down home.” She had had a good Nfld education (imitating the English way & using the same textbooks) and tried to impart its principles at the local high school but found that “standards” were different here. Up the drive from me lives a teacher who had been in her English class. Jimmy[?] says he refused to memorize & recite a speech of Shakespeare as she ordered and he appealed to the principal, who ruled that “memorization” was not American. It seems that the American way in pubic education is to arrange it so that everyone gets a diploma, if he stays in school.*10 The fun part of this is that Jimmy went to college, became [?] by W.S.*11 by an enthusiastic professor & now teaches English Lit. in a private high school near here, but  follows the incarnation of the U.S. public school “establishment” he does not require memorization and recitation (So I recited to him Henry V's speech to his troops at Harfleur, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends; once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead...” etc. W.S. was very good at putting immortal speeches into the mouths of not very bright[?] English leaders.

            Back again to Carpoon and Cape Harrison*12 . In her cookhouse days there, my mother and Evie[?] somehow went along with the DAVIS crews up & down the Labrador coast. She could rattle off the names of fishing places in accurate geographical succession, but was sorry she never got as far north as Cape Chudleigh (Chidley).*13

            Of course persistent economic “hard times” have depopulated many an old time village. Many others were officially [?] abandoned when “Joey” SMALLWOOD was P.M.*14 He later got the oldest colony to become the youngest province. Mulley's Cove, next to Broad Cove, was where my ancestor, our James, settled and eventually prospered. Now it is so depopulated that it no longer appears[?] on my latest map, although Broad Cove and Small Pt. still do. However, I hear regularly from my second cousin Walter*15 , the last male Reynolds in Small Point. In his last letter he said his brother Berkeley had reached retirement [?] from the ministry and was seriously considering buying or “seizing” a vacant house in Mulley's Cove for a “summer place” if not a regular residence. And I have other retired cousins who go “down home” for a visit in the summer. One of them has sent us a fat Canadian magazine for ex-Newfies called The Downhomer!

            When I get around to Ct I will lend (or give) you a copy of my shorter history of my family. The KINGs are there.*16 At present I have only one copy left, but expect to get more by Xmas, as my “madam” Christine is in the printing business in Mass. & has made copies for her family & distributed some at a REYNOLDS - MOORE wedding in August last.

            Now, at last, about Dick Briehler[?]) and his “publishing” ideas. I happen to be unusually un-American though born in Chelsea, Mass. (and left it at 20 mos): I have no interest in money apart from food, clothing, housing and enough to buy more books & learn more. My kid (76) brother Ray near San Diego came to the U.S. at 5, so has been thoroughly Americanized. After a career in journalism & teaching same, he is eager to make money by writing books. He had at least 3 published and is now busy on one about “Hollywood Egos” which he thinks will really “sell.” So Ray is very unlike me. Our cultures are very different, but his son Chris is the brilliant Travel Editor of the L.A. Times. His stuff even gets reprinted back here in the woods. I refuse to start another page! But you write again. I may contact Buehler. Thanks for his address.

                                                                        As ever, the Ancient One (92)   CJR