“. . . and altho I trust I shall be at all times ready to obey any call my country may make upon me, God only knows the sacrifice it will be to make, whenever I shall think it my duty to become a married man. It is now seven-and-twenty years that Madame St. Laurent and I have lived together: we are of the same age, and have been in all climates, and in all difficulties together; and you may well imagine, Mr. Creevey, the pang it will occasion me to part with her . . . As for Madame St. Laurent herself, I protest I don’t know what is to become of her if a marriage is to be forced upon me; her feelings are already so agitated upon the subject.”

“For an hour we talked of Anne and that famous farm on Prince Edward Island. Thus the friendship began.”

“Even with, or perhaps, because of, this background, I have over the past few years sensed a very dramatic change in attitude on the part of Prince Edward Islanders towards the on-going rush for so-called modernization.”

“So I had nothing to distract me from my books and their other worlds that swallowed me whole, from Narnia to the Wisconsin woods, from a small town in Sweden to the red earth of Prince Edward Island. Nothing and no one interested me as much as my books.”

“The New ContinentA Norwegian coin of the Viking era was once found in Maine; however, no indication of a settlement was found that could be used to verify the exact location of any landings. Perhaps it just became too cold and the growing season too short for them to linger on in this cold region. What is relatively certain is that it was not uncommon for the Vikings to sail their boats, called knars, west from Greenland to present-day Labrador. During the summer months, the warmer currents carried them north along the western coast of Greenland to what is now known as the Davis Strait, and from there they most likely headed due west for about two hundred miles over open water to Baffin Island. The Labrador Current could then have taken them as far south as the coasts of Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and possibly Maine and Cape Cod.Read & Share the daily blogs and weekly commentaries “From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker, author of the award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba” available at Amazon.com.”

“. . . and altho I trust I shall be at all times ready to obey any call my country may make upon me, God only knows the sacrifice it will be to make, whenever I shall think it my duty to become a married man. It is now seven-and-twenty years that Madame St. Laurent and I have lived together: we are of the same age, and have been in all climates, and in all difficulties together; and you may well imagine, Mr. Creevey, the pang it will occasion me to part with her . . . As for Madame St. Laurent herself, I protest I don’t know what is to become of her if a marriage is to be forced upon me; her feelings are already so agitated upon the subject.”