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1
2
3
12 3
4 5 6
Down North and Up Along
iBiiim
iiiiWll
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AITINC; FOR THE 1 IDE
Down North and
Up Along
By
Margaret Warner Morley
Author of '« The Honey-makers," «« The Bee People,"
etc.
fVith Illustrations
%
New YoiK
Dodd Mead
and Company
1912
PC
53/7 V
/9/Z
Copyright^ igoo
Bv DoDD, Mead and Company
UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.
7//. 7^-
CONTENTS
Pack
I. DiGBY ^ ^ .
II. Cannon Field lg
III. Acadia -g
IV. Acadia's Crops ^n
V. Grand Pr£ -_
VI. Evangeline gq
VII. The Acadians 8q
VIII. Blomidon „.
94
IX. Partridge Island uq
X. Halifax • • . . . no
XI. Toward Cape Breton iaS
XII. Baddeck ..g
XIII. Englishtown ...».,.., 17^
XIV. French River ,„.
XV. Cape Smoky 21 .
XVI. Ingonish ^ ^ 2qr
XVII. The Half Way House 254
XVIII. AsPY Bay . * * ^^^
XIX. Cape North ^g-
gaBaBJSBaa
ILLUSTRATIONS
Waiting for the Tide Frontispiea
Facing Pace
DlCBY . . , , ,
Sounds drying ...
«4
Ox WITH Head Yoke ... «
••••••• 2e
At the End of the Day , ^
A Leafy Tent op the Micmacs 33
Spinning .
"54
Cape Smoky, Cape Breton ' .g
Drying Cod .
... 208
Splitting Tables . .
210
Early Morning on the Coast .
* • • • Z Zx
Washing Potatoes . .
230
Catching Trout for Dinner
„ ^44
'booking Trout . .
262
Clybourn's Brook . .
278
A Fishing Schooni-r . . ,
••••••.. 296
ne illustration, in this book are from photographs l.y An^elia M. Watson,
Edttb S. fFatson, and Frank G. fVamcr,
MAPS
Facing Pags
Nova Scotia •••...,,.. g
CoRNWALLis Valley ,g
Cape Breton Island . , , , ,^3
>•
II
Down North and Up Along
DIGBY
THE St. John River runs uphill. Not
through its whole course, and not
all the time. Still, it runs uphill, as
one can readily see by standing at
high tide on the bridge that crosses its mouth
at the town of St. John, and watching the
water rush like a mill-race up from the Bay of
Fundy into the land, where it pours over rocks
in cascades that fall the wrong way.
Aside from this eccentricity, the St. John Is
an orderly and very beautiful stream, winding
in its course and bordered by lovely headlands.
From St. John, New Brunswick, to Digby,
Nova Scotia, is a three or five hours' sail, ac-
cording to the condition of the " St. Rupert's '*
steam cylinders, that humorous vessel having a
way of blowing one or more of them out just
before tne hour of starting.
The way from St. John to Digby lies across
the Bay of Fundy. What better port of entry
to a new country could be desired than the
Down North and Up Along
sounding Bay of Fundy, with the high tides
of one's childhood's geography still beating on
its shores ?
And then the thrill of mingled indignation
and satisfaction with which one suddenly dis-
covers the English flag over one's head instead
of the stars and stripes ! Indignation thus to be
sailing under a foreign flag in one's own coun-
try, as it were, but satisfaction to have reached
foreign soil with so little effort. One always
observes with regret that the English flag is
far more beautiful than the stars and stripes, —
for no amount of loyalty can blend a stripe
of red and then of white into a harmony truly
grateful to the eye.
The Bay of Fundy cannot be described as
an exciting spectacle on that calm August day
when first we saw it. Indeed, it very much
resembled any other expanse of water, and if its
tides are beyond all reason we did not perceive
it then.
We came sailing through the Digby Gut at
sunset, the clear waters of Fundy behind us, the
Annapolis Basin opening dream-like in front,
while to the right the bold front of Beaman*s
Mountain, and to the left the abrupt termina-
J^igh
tion of North Mountain, narrowed the Gut to
its present mile-wide channel, holding it in
sure rocky bonds that no monster tides nor
winter storms could unloose.
If the gods are propitious, when the traveller
sails through Digby Gut he will have a clear
sky under which the Annapolis Basin will lie
blue, and in the distance misty, defined by the
pleasing outlines of its purple-blue hills. On
the right Digby will lie, so dream-like and
lovely that one fears to draw near, lest it
vanish and a commonplace village take its
place.
If the gods are wholly inclined to favour the
traveller, he will approach Digby, not only at
sunset, on a clear day, but at low tide as well.
Then the village that in the distance was a
vision of wonderful blues and purples will not
grow commonplace as he comes near, for he
will forget all about it.
By the time he is close enough to discover
its unpoetical and actual state his attention will
be centred upon the wharf that towers high
above the smoke-stack of the steamer as it
comes alongside it. Far above the passengers*
heads a heavy wall of planks is hung with wet
3
I
I
il:
Down North and Up Along
seaweeds and painted deep browns and greens
by the ocean, while clusters of barnacles add
their gray and white to the strange decorations.
There is a strong salt smell in the air, that
fragrance of seaweed that always brings loving
memories of landing on distant shores.
The " St. Rupert " did not seem so small a
saint until we came under this giant sea-tapes-
tried wharf and saw the people above leaning
over and peering down into the depths where we
wallowed in the sea. And we saw no method
shr~t of flight which could raise us to their
level.
I expected M., my artist friend, who is timid
in the face of high places, to look worried over
the situation ; but no, she was as serene as a
May morning. The wharf was picturesque,
hence so commonplace an emotion as fear was
no luxury here, and she left the responsibility
of landing to the English government while
she enjoyed the novel scene to the utmost.
High wharves have their own secrets, we
were to learn, as the boat with much puffing
and snorting and rope-pulling finally swung
about and we discovered ourselves close to a
landing within the pier. Beneath one side of
4
m
ity
ile
I
of
Digby
W I ■■ — - I — I -■ - .- I ■- .-■ I , _ ^
it a wedge had been cut out, the narrow end
on shore, and the wide one out in the water
under the wharf. The opening thus formed
was heavily planked within, and we crossed the
gangway into a cavern slimy and strange.
The floor upon which we stepped was damp,
barnacles encrusted the beams at the sides and
overhead, while green, brown, and yellow sea-
weeds hung on the walls, and a large starfish
with his arms wrapped about a stone appeared
to be gazing knowingly at us out of one round
Cyclopean eye, which, alas ! was no eye at all,
and we knew that in spite of his wise look he
was as blind as a mole.
There was a strong clean odour of the sea in
this strange cavern, and we heard some one
near say that at high tide the place upon which
we stood would be thirty feet under water. So
this giant wharf was a tribute to the tides of
Fundy !
We had a sudden wish to get out; we im-
agined the tide coming in — swiftly, surely;
concealing the existence of this hole in the side
of the pier; the surface of the water sparkling
in the sunlight twenty feet higher than the
roof of the dark cavern.
5
r-T
Down North and Up Along
Strong horses, drawing low-swung trucks,
came tramping down the incline. There was a
crowd of people making their way toward the
oblong space of light at the top. We joined
the throng, and as we reached the top turned
and looked back.
Above us were great jointed timbers form-
ing a rude arch ; within was the half-lighted
cavern with its sea-painted walls. It was a
strange sight and one that often afterward
drew us to the wharf when the tide was low at
the hour of landing. Up out of the sea-cavern
poured a stream of people ; dim in the back-
ground was a pool of water where the blind
starfish clasped its stone and waited for the
incoming tide.
The people seemed to be coming up out of
this water, and they should have been stream-
ing with seaweed and clad in scales.
We were not disappointed in Digby. It is
not the dream city that we saw from the boat,
but it is good. Its houses are commonplace
and uninteresting. Still, we found it good to
be in Digby. Its location, the buildings stand-
ing on one long street under a hillside, reminds
one of Provincetown, but the sand-hills of that
6
Digby
fishy place of delight are lacking here ; this hill-
side is sodded with the most brilliant green,
and groups of trees grow upon it.
At present life is simple in Digby. The
" Americans," as they call us of the United
States, have not yet invaded it enough to spoil
its simplicity. But it is only a question of
time when fair Digby will belong to the
summer tourist. Now it is in possession of
the codfish. Everywhere through the vil-
lage, which straggles in a way to make com-
pensation in part for its crimes in architecture,
are to be seen rows upon rows of " flakes,"
covered in fair weather with the triumphant
form of the cod, with reinforcements of the
less-esteemed haddock, hake, and pollock.
The codfish flakes are the same here as on
Cape Cod, the same gray skeletons built of
slats laid across long side-pieces, like wide,
close-runged ladders placed parallel to the earth
and supported two feet or so above it.
One likes codfish flakes, just as one does
old houses and old-fashioned posy-beds. They
give character to a place, and they always select
the most picturesque corners and fields in which
to exhibit themselves. They cling to the
7
'-*»■>. m i n i .^. H ff'^-^irBn-Ti. ^■^-.«,^-*.-v»«.<,
:/!
i
i\
Down North and Up Aloitg
shores, pre-empt all unoccupied places about
the wharves, and cluster about the cottages
of the poor. They are seldom level, but
pursue a wavy, uncertain course, as though,
gray and decrepit, they were about to give
up mortal strife and settle in peace to the
earth beneath. And then the odour of them !
Anyone who does not love the faint fragrance
that clings to the gray old flakes has no kin-
ship with the ocean.
During the summer months upon the flakes
lies the wealth of Digby. Here the codfish is
spread out to dry. The time of greatest
ignominy as well as of greatest picturesqueness
for a codfish is during its season of drying
upon the flakes. It may then be sat upon
or stood upon and otherwise misused. It
loses its identity completely, and nobody feels
the slightest obligation to show it respect. It
has lost its fishly and elegant proportions ;
it is flat, shrunken, saturated with salt, and
lies, acres of it, spread out on its flakes to
render to the strong sea-breezes and the heat
of the sun the last remnant of water in its
withered form. It gives a quaint colouring to
the landscape and fills the air with its own
8
U07lg
ces about
cottages
evel, but
though,
: to give
e to the
of them !
fragrance
5 no kin-
he flakes
:odfish is
greatest
squeness
f drying
at upon
sed. It
)dy feels
)ect. It
ortions ;
alt, and
akes to
the heat
r in its
Liring to
its own
O
u
en
■-#
Dig by
inimitable fragrance, — the frjigrance that lin-
gers about the flakes when its form is no longer
there. It sends forth a clean appetising odour
very different from the fishy incense that per-
vades Provincetown, that mingled odour of
fresh, stale, and salt fish with a flavouring of tar
and bilge-water, the memory of which pursues
the stranger, but does not fill him with emo-
tions of delight.
The memory of the fragrant Digby fish-
flakes is a pleasure. Digby is so exquisitely
clean, the air from Fundy is so abundant and
clear, that the only rivals to the odour of the
drying cod are the salt smell of the seaweeds
at low tide and the fragrance from the sur-
rounding flower-gardens.
Whether the sailor men like it or not, they
are obliged to keep ship and wharf clean when
in Digby. The law gives them a sharp prod
in the form of a fine if they grow negligent.
The great winds are a wholesome purifier of
both ship and town, but even so, the cleanliness
of the fishing-schooners as they come in loaded
is something of a surprise. It is something
of a surprise too to see the cod put through
his phases, from the shining fish that comes
-{"
Down North and Up Along
in on the schooners to the dull triangular
form that appears on the flakes.
One thinks of the pitchfork as an implement
of the farm ; it bears upon its prongs sugges-
tions of new-mown hay and golden straw, but
here at Digby its real meaning is apparent. It
is Neptune's trident with one of the prongs
lost in the vortex of time. It is used, of course,
in its proper field, — to pitch codfish. Out of
the ship's hold the shining forms are tossed as
a farmer's boy tosses a sheaf of grain.
They have already, while on shipboard,
gone through their first sad experiences, and
now, headless, heartless, and saturated with
salt, though still with shining skins, they are
pitchforked from the hold to the deck.
Another trident-bearer then pitchforks them to
the wharf. Here they are pitchforked to the
wooden cradle in which they are weighed.
From the cradle they are once more pitchforked
into a great quivering heap on the wharf.
Thence they are pitchforked into wheelbarrows
and wheeled to the store-room, where they are
pitchforked into vats and resalted.
As the cod receives his last pitchforking you
examine him, expecting to find him riddled
xo
Digby
with holes and as ragged as Rip Van Winkle's
old coat at the end of his twenty years* sleep
on the mountain. But here is matter for reflec-
tion. Try your best you cannot find a hole
in him. He bears a charmed anatomy. He
must certainly have been constructed with
special reference to being pitchforked.
There is a fiction about his getting a scrub-
bing when he reaches land. This is a treatment
which, to the observer, he appears to need
several times before he is finally considered
" cured." But he gets it only once, one scrub-
bing, like a plenary indulgence, evidently being
thought sufficient to wipe away future as well as
present stains. There are reasons for conjec-
turing that the scrubbing is sometimes omitted
altogether, and that he is introduced to his flakes
with the manifold marks of his captivity upon
him.
He rests awhile in the vats of salt into which
he was finally pitchforked, then is taken out
and " press-piled " for a few days. This is not
as bad as being pitchforked. It is merely
being piled up, tail in and shoulders out, into
a round mound by the fish-flakes. These
mounds of penitent cod are a part of the
II
I
Down North and Up Along
picturesqueness of the actual life of the flakes.
There is now no more pitchforking ; that ordeal
at least is over.
The fish are spread upon the flakes by hand,
and the operator becomes very expert in shying
a dried cod into exactly the right spot. An
expert will shy cod half the length of a long
flake and never make a miss.
Here they lie in the sun to be blown upon
by the kindly winds, and if these winds prove
unkindly and blow upon the patient cod dust
from the road and soot from the chimneys, that
is but a slight vicissitude in the life of a dried
codfish which nobody minds.
When night comes the cod are gathered up
into piles on the flakes and covered over. In
the morning they are spread out again. This
is repeated every fair day until they are dry
enough, when they are put into the picturesque
press-piles again to await transportation to
distant markets. Such is the history attached
to the fragrant flakes, and such is the occupation
of Digby,
Nothing looks less likely to produce a large
income than a pile of dried codfish, perhaps
with an old coat hung over it, that being the
12
r.^
handiest way of disposing of the garment until
needed. Yet these thin, gray, misshapen
spectres have an incredible amount of good meat
packed under their shrivelled skins, and they
bring in many thousands of dollars to the
industrious fisher-folk.
Nor, while we are upon the subject, is dried
fish the sailor's only revenue from the prodigal
cod. Upon the decks of the ships are great
odorous vats full of livers from which the sun's
rays are economically extracting the oil.
Fish oil once encountered is very lasting, and
is not readily forgotten — or forgiven. The
cod-liver oil of the apothecary is a fragrant
delicacy compared to the contents of the vats
as they come frothing in from the fishing
grounds.
Then there are the "sounds," as the sailors
call the swim-bladders. They too are saved,
and having been dried in the sun go to the
manufacturer to come forth as gelatin, or
perchance as glue. " Fried fresh sounds and
cods' tongues " form a delicacy highly prized
by the fisher-folk and not to be scorned by the
discriminating stranger.
The sounds are sent to the United States,
13
f!
Down North and Up Along
mostly to Boston, and the oil too is sent to the
United States, to heal her consumptives and
grease her machinery, but the cod himself takes
his last sea- voyage from Digby to the West
Indies.
The ^est Indians must have an unappeas-
able appetite for dried codfish, judging from
the quantities reputed to be sent there. Every
week-day Digby prepares codfish for the West
Indians, but not on Sunday. Those who think
it a sin for cod to dry on Sunday have raised
a bulwark about weak humanity that might be
tempted, by imposing a fine upon the public
appearance of the cod on the Lord's day.
This information was given M. by an owner
of cod-flakes who was out one Sunday morning
in quest of his cow. The good man was in his
work-a-day clothes, which made him feel
ashamed. He apologised for not being dressed
up as became a respectable man on Sunday,
saying he did not expect to meet with ladies.
This little incident well illustrates the con-
dition of the people here, and the feeling of
self-respect that seems to animate every one.
While the cod may not appear upon Sunday
without causing disgrace to his owner, still,
14
r^i
Soi
D
UNDS URVING
■ V *n<*3,r 'X'WW*v^W«!!l^i*?'?^t«t'^'^^ri*«?*^^
t 1
Digby
,,,, I '■"
there are exceptions to all rules, M.'s apolo-
getic Sabbath-breaker owned, and she there-
upon learned that the limit of Digby's piety is
the condition of her codfish, for if there should
be a week of bad weather, and the fish in
danger of spoiling, they may sun themselves of
a Sunday without injury to the souls of their
owners.
M.'s informant was himself a member of the
Church of England, because, as he explained,
the " English " were not as strict as the Bap-
tists and Methodists. He did not think it was
wicked to sketch on Sunday, a statement which
comforted M. greatly, as she was engaged at
the time in that sinful Sunday occupation.
IS
I " II I ir i ir i niniinrm'T''"-~- — im ni
:•■
II
CANNON FIELD
IN Digby the temptation to sketch is con-
stant, M. says. One wants to be at it all
the time. There are a few, a very few
picturesque houses, but it is the coast it-
self, the queer high wharves, the fish-flakes, the
storehouses, the old apple-trees on Cannon
Field, and the numberless views on every
hand outside the village that appeal to one
most.
Cannon Field is a place easy to be discovered
without help, but it does not detract from its
merits to have it enthusiastically pointed out
by a small boy whose peculiar anatomy is ex-
plained when he proceeds to unload from
blouse and pockets several quarts of live snails
which he deposits at your feet that he may the
better instruct you upon the topography of
Digby and criticise your sketch of a neighbour-
ing wharf. The small boy is always present
when one sits down to paint, and often he is
not unwelcome, particularly if he informs his
hearers, as this one did, vvith a pride quite justi-
i6
'k I
Cannon Field
fiable, if the statement were correct, that his
father owned the Baptist Church of Boston.
Cannon Field is to the right upon coming
up from the wharf. It is at the top of a bluff
whose base is washed by the sea at high tide.
It is but an open grassy field, containing a
group of large willows, a few gnarled old apple
and cherry trees, half-a-dozen defunct cannon
with their noses in the ground, and two living
ones with their noses suspiciously sniffing the
air of the quiet Basin.
But there is a charm about it that makes one
go again and again, go and lie on the grass in
the warmth of the sun or the shade of the wil-
lows, and look off over the beautiful Annapolis
Basin with its one narrow, high-walled entrance
at Digby Gut.
Perhaps, as you lie thus, the scattered fisher-
men's houses on the other shore fade from
sight and the vessels in the Basin melt away,
leaving rock and water and dark evergreen
forest in possession. Then, perhaps, two small
ships, which are not fishing schooners nor any
craft that sail these waters to-day, come sailing
through the Digby Gut. The men on their
decks are wary and eager. Where Digby lies
a 17
m
ml
m
r
^npM
SSBOi
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they see no town, only the scarred rock that
holds back the mighty tides, the long grass-
grown terrace where a town will one day lie, —
a town of aliens, — the hill behind grown thick
with firs ; these are all that greet their eager
eyes, and their two little ships sail on into the
lovely land-locked Basin.
You know them well. They are the French,
who scarcely three hundred years ago ventured
across the broad Atlantic in those little ships
of theirs. Through Digby Gut they came one
fair spring morning, the first white men whose
eyes had rested on those shores. In they
came, the advance guard of civilisation to a
new piece of the world.
The little ships sail up the Basin and out of
sight behind a wooded island.
So much for the dream on Caniion Field.
You rub your eyes and look about you. The
Basin is dotted over with boats ; the town of
Digby lies on the slopes behind you. British
guns point down the Basin in the direction the
two little ships have gone. But they are safe.
They sailed behind that island almost three
hundred years ago. The British guns cannot
touch them nor can aught destroy them : they
x8
Cannon Field
of
are immortal, preserved in the history of three
great nations.
Perhaps the tall old apple-trees on Cannon
Field were placed there long ago by French
hands. They are very un-American apple-
trees indeed, and one is inclined to question
their title to be called apple-trees at all, until
among their scattered leaves are discovered
unequivocal it not tempting apples.
At the foot of the bluff is the deep sea basai
where the water rises and falls from twenty-
eight to thirty feet, twice each day. But one
does not realise the magnitude of the tides at
this point. One does not realise it at all at
first. The flowing of the tide is fast but
gradual : the mighty basin fills, fills, until the
tall pier is an ordinary wharf, with no hint of
a hole in its side, and a broad sheet of water
smiles and sparkles in the sun.
Through the Gut the tides come racing with
frightful velocity, making the smaller boats
watchful about entering, but once inside, the
waters spread without much commotion and
fill the great Basin to its brim.
Swiftly but gradually the waters subside, the
pier grows tall, long points of shining gravel
19
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Down North and Up Along
reach out into the water. With its seaweed-
painted rocks, its purple shining sands, its
bared weirs, the coast is much more pictur-
esque, though less impressive, at low tide.
Cannon Field is a place to dream in. Ro-
mance and history have woven their bright
fabrics before its very eyes. A remnant of
those Indians who fill our histories in that
confusing chapter known as the French and
Indian Wars have their tents to the right as
one faces the village, at the end of a little
green lane that borders on Cannon Field.
They are not there for scalps this bright sum-
mer day, but for bits of the white man's magic
silver, which they hope to get in exchange for
the baskets and moccasins they have woven
and worked upon through the long winter.
There is a pappoose in one of the tents
which the "American " ladies, with a unanim-
ity in humour which one hopes is not national,
all inquire the price of.
Digby houses are as ugly as two-story
wooden cottages, with narrow fa9ades and
steep roofs, must be, and they also possess
the inartistic virtues of cleanliness and new
paint. Few Digby houses go to ruin for lack
I
Cannon Field
of paint ; consequently the town has a very new
look, and presents a thrifty and well-to-do ap-
pearance as exasperating to the artist as it is
doubtless gratifying to the inhabitant. But
these objectionable dwellings are in part re-
deemed by their flower-gardens.
Fish-flakes and flowers can do much for a
place, be it never so ugly, and in Digby there
are flowers everywhere. The people have a
pretty way of putting them wherever there is
a place to hold them. One sees pots of
blooming plants in the cellar windows on the
main street, where the houses add to their
other crimes against good taste that of open-
ing directly upon the sidewalk. Flower-pots
stand on brackets on the side of the house and
often bank up two sides of the little extended
entry-way.
It is pleasant to enter a house between walls
of flowers, and it is pleasant to stop before the
yards and interview the tangles of poppies and
pinks and all sorts of bright and spicy flower-
folk that do congregate in those places.
Digby flowers appear to grow for the mere
joy of it, they are so bright and spicy, and
crowd out the weeds with such vigour, some-
ax
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Down North and Up Along
times overflowing the garden and straggling
out to the roadside. They remind one of
Celia Thaxter's flowers at the light-house on
the Isles of Shoals, seeming to have the same
qualities of brilliancy and fragrance.
A house without flowers is the rare excep-
tion in Digby. They give character to the
place and rob the cheap frame buildings of
half their ugliness, and occasionally they make
one charming. There is a delightful old gar-
den almost surrounding a tiny house, f?cing
Cannon Field. The house itself is covered
with vines which are vastly more becoming
than paint, and into the garden seem to have
come all the sweet old-fashioned posies from
long ago to now.
It is a pleasure to sauntei over from Can-
non Field and lean on the low fence, behind
which is such profusion of bloom. The back
yard, too, is a flower-garden, sharing the pre-
cious soil with the plum-trees and gooseberry
bushes.
If fruits and vegetables were to flourish in
Digby soil as the flowers do, the cod would
have a formidable rival, but the stern earth
yields its juices freely to only the coaxing root-
32
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Cannon Field
lets of its favourites, the flowers, and the people
have to send elsewhere for their cabbages.
We thank the earth for this : fish-flakes and
flowers belong to Digby ; cabbages belong
to anybody.
Digby has cherries, however. The place is
full of gnarled old trees, and there are orchards
of them in the country round about.
If Digby had picturesque houses, it would be
almost too charming a spot for the visitor. It
has two or three. They are to be found
on the Racquet, an inlet running in along one
side of the town. They are little gray, wide-
roofed, old fisherman*s houses, guiltless of paint
and very much the worse for wear. Digby no
doubt is ashamed of them, and they must be
very uncomfortable to live in, but with their
tall hollyhocks, their clustering fish-flakes, the
background of water, and the distant mountain-
top, they make distracting pictures.
Behind them are the wharves where the fish-
ing-schooners come in to leave their burdens
of cod. The ships sail up the Racquet in gal-
lant style. It is a pretty sheet of water, with
its curving shore-line and its background of
Reaman's Mountain ; and one never would sus-
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pect, after watching the laden vessels enter,
that the haven they have sought is there for
but a few hours at a time, by the grace of
Neptune.
The Racquet, like many another bay along
this coast, is a gift of the giant tides of Fundy.
When the tide goes out, the ships lie on their
keels in the gravel, and the hard bed of the
Racquet becomes an excellent roadway for teams
that wish to reach the other shore.
In the morning one may cross the Racquet
dry-shod; in the afternoon laden vessels will
sail over his footprints.
There are no weirs in the Racquet ; but if
one desire those fantastic forms, let him walk
to the farther end of the town through its one
long street, and there he will come upon the
broad and winding Joggin. It is another tidal
basin, but the receding waters do not lay it
bare. Into it the fish come in shoals with the
coming of the water, but at the going out of
the water they remain, for the weirs have their
long arms about them.
These weirs are distinguished among their
kind by their simplicity. The fisherman does
not lavish costly nets upon them, as is the case
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along the New England shore. He simply
drives poles close together into the mud at low
tide, about them weaves the pliant branches of
trees in and out into a rude network, and to
the top of the poles ties brushwood to mark
the place of the weirs at high tide.
These primitive fish-snares seem to have no
definite form, but straggle about here, there, and
everywhere ; and the Joggin, with its purple
sands and grassy banks and its weirs trailing
reflections in the water, is a place one loves to
recall.
It is a gratification to be able to chronicle
the fact that in addition to her other virtues
simple Digby is still in the ox-cart period.
And this, despite the " Flying Bluenose " that
daily goes shrieking over the rails that have
been laid in her streets. It is oxen that unload
the vessels and do the hard work on the roads,
and oxen that bring the country people to
town.
Oxen exhale a pastoral something that affects
all their neighbourhood. Go gee-hawing
down Broadway with a yoke of oxen attached
to a broad-tired cart, and New York herself
would remember the days of her childhood,
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Down North and Up Along
when Canal Street deserved its name even
more than at present, when the buxom milk-
maid filled her foaming pail in the Bowery.
Digby is a clean, wind-blown, beflowered, and
beflaked little fishing village, but when along
her streets the ox-carts go rumbling and sham-
bling, she becomes something more ; she has a
part in the fields and the grassy lanes as well
as in the salt sea.
Digby oxen have none of the coyness and
head-turnings common to their " American **
kindred. They are apparently as unconcerned
and stolid at the approach of a stranger as was
the blind starfish in the cavern under the wharf.
They turn their heads neither to the right nor
to the left when in the yoke, but face front as
unswervingly as if on military parade. Their
eyes, which roll in the direction of the one
approaching, alone betray the curiosity natural
to their race. They have an un-oxlike dig-
nity and precision of movement, which is
rather impressive, and which is not wholly
owing to the superior character of Nova Scotia
cattle, for their ingenious masters have placed
the yoke upon their heads instead of about
their necks.
26
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Cannon Field
A broad bar of wood lies across the necks
just behind the horns about which it fits closely.
It is held in place by strong leather straps bound
tightly across the foreheads just below the
horns. "When oxen are thus yoked, their
heads are almost as immovable as if held in
a vise. The tongue of the cart, which is at-
tached to the bar between the oxen, is held
very high, on a level with or even higher than
the eyes. It is amusing to see this head-gear
adjusted. In order sufficiently to tighten the
straps, the man must have some point of re-
sistance, and this he finds in the face of the ox
himself He braces his knee against the broad
and kindly front of his comrade and Hes back
on the strap with all his weight. The ox blinks
calmly on and says not a word. In spite of
his queer head-gear the Nova Scotia ox an-
swers to the same lingo as does his " Ameri-
can " brother, and the familiar " gee, haw,
back, g* long," may be heard mingling with
the tinkle of his bell any hour of the day in
Digby.
For each ox has his bell. It is an agreeable
bell with a pleasant tinkle-tankle, and rather
an expensive luxury, a pair of bells and their
37
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Down North and Up Along
straps costing three dollars and a half, so the
owner of an ox told us.
The DIgby ox has not quite " bells on his
fingers and rings on his toes, by which he
makes music wherever he goes," as was the
case with the young person in the nursery
rhyme, but he has a bell on his neck and a
little metal shoe on each of his toes, by which
he makes as good music wandering about the
stony byways in his hours of freedom as one
frequently hears from more elaborate instru-
ments. At least, it is never out of time or out
of tune.
One need not fear meeting our friend, for he
is the gentlest ox in the world ; much hand-
ling has made him that. He has lost the tra-
dition of horns as weapons, and looks upon
them only as a convenience for moving heavy
loads for other people.
Besides the ox-teams there ar^, the horses
drawing their low-swung trucks. If the Nova
Scotian has invented his head yoke, he has cer-
tainly borrowed his truck from his brother the
" American," or is it vice versa ? for it is the
same convenient means of transportation the
Cape Cod man employs. The bottom of
28
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Ox WITH Head Yoke
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Cannon Field
the cart is so swung from the hubs that it is
only four or five inches from the ground, sav-
ing a great deal of strength, one should think,
in loading and unloading. One wonders why
the Yankee has not made more use of this
idea, and why one does not see it in the flat
prairie towns of the West.
What is the law that decrees certain imple-
ments and customs to be retained within cer-
tain limits ? Why does the farmer in one
Rhode Island county rake his hay as his fore-
fathers were wont, and in three adjoining ones
gather it speedily by means of a long rope ?
Why does the low-swung truck, local to Cape
Cod, crop out again in Nova Scotia ?
There is a tremendous vis inertia in human
affairs that preserves the individuality of places
in spite of the levelling power of the " new
civilisation." Blessings on it! Long may
it preserve Digby's dusty fish-flakes and her
military oxen with tHeir tinkling bells !
It would not do to leave Digby without
making the acquaintance of the famous " Digby
chickens." These are not feathered bipeds, but
good red herrings. They are large and oily,
and their smoked skins are a beautiful golden
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* ■ ■ ' '— - — ■■,—,.- - ■■- II ■ ^
bronze, played over by bright, iridescent hues.
To give an idea of these when properly " kip-
pered " would excite u: 3 envy in the hearts
of all who grasped the idea. These favoured
fish are called " Digby angels " in other towns
of Nova Scotia, but it is to be feared this is
due to a spirit of mockery engendered by
jealousy.
Reluctantly we prepared to leave Digby, and
one morning found ourselves on the " Flying
Bluenose," and speeding along the Annapolis
Basin in the direction the two little ships had
sailed so long ago.
" Bluenose" in Nov^ cotia is equivalent to
" Yankee " in New England. The derivation of
" Yankee " is uncertain, — nobody knows exactly
where it came from, nor who invented and first
applied it ; consequently there is a pleasant mys-
tery about it which enables us to forget its
plebeian sound and even to feel proud of any
claim to the title.
But there is no reclaiming haze of mystery
about the meaning of "Bluenose," though the
Bluenoses themselves are frequently unable,
or possibly ashamed, to explain it. One old
v»'oman told us it came from the " Flying
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Bluenose." But her daughter explained, look-
ing askance at us, as though to make sure we
were serious in our desire for information,
" You ought to see us in November ! "
It seems there is a " Flying Yankee" train
on the " American " side ; and Nova Scotia, not
to be outdone by " them Yanks," started the
" Flying Bluenose " on her side, which was not
strictly original, though it is considered com-
mendable, as the " Flying Bluenose " is a very
good express train, running all the way from
Yarmouth, on the western point of Nova Scotia,
to Halifax, a couple of hundred miles away as
the road runs.
Next to originality is the power to know a
good thing when it is seen, and then to imi-
tate it.
The " Flying Bluenose " crossed the high
bridge just out of Digby and bore us toward
one of the most interesting historic spots in
North America.
It is the spot where the two French ships
came to anchor, bringing the first white settlers
to a new world. The place is called Annapolis
now, though at its founding in 1605 '^ ^^^^
the name of Port Royal, and is, as every one
31
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Down North and Up Along
m I ■- I- ■' ■ ■■■■ ~ " ^ ■■ 11-. — ^
knows, next to St. Augustine the oldest Euro-
pean settlement in North America. It seemed
a pity to go h^^rrying by it when we saw the
lovely meadows sloping to the town, their yel-
lows, greens, browns, and reds mingling in a
half summer, half autumn mood.
The grass-grown earthworks were inviting,
too, and the old gray stone magazine standing
in the centre gave an air of antiquity to the
place. The water was out, and the red and
brown sands on the shores of the Annapolis
Basin lay exposed, adding their charm of colour
to the scene.
But we were to see no more of Annapolis
than the glimpse from the train. M. was
afraid to. She wished to preserve the romance
and mystery with which her imagination had
enveloped it ; and having recently lost the life-
long mystery of the Bay of Fundy by too
great familiarity with that cheery and in no
way mysterious body of water, she felt that
she could not afford the risk of depleting
the storehouse of her imagination any farther
at present.
So we went on, imagining Port Royal as it
was when in possession of the French, smoking
32
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Cannon Field
their lobster-claw pipes ; and in spite of their
precarious tenure of home and life in a country
of savages, revelling through that winter of
long ago and instituting the Order of the Good
Time. They had their fun, but \t did not last,
for enemies in the mother country as well as
from abroad quickly shifted the actors from one
scene to another ; and out of the confusion of
'.he times there stands clearly but one poetic
form, that of a woman, Madame La Tour.
Perhaps she does not belong specially to Port
Royal, but she does belong to the history of
that time ; and by her heroic deeds has earned
a place in the memory of man, — a place which
will be recognised when her poet arises to sing
her into fame. She stands waiting, a dim fig-
ure, for the Longfellow who shall take her by
the hand and place her glowing in the eyes and
the hearts of the people.
The Annapolis River, which enters the head
of the Basin, owes the greater part of its vol-
ume to the tide-water. Its channel is deep and
gullied, as seen at low tide, and its banks are
composed of sleek, shining mud that, half the
time uncovered, yet never has time to dry. As
we follow its course we see the ships lying
3 33
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Down North and Up Along
high up on the mud banks, miles from water
enough to float them.
One dropping suddenly down upon this
strange sight might well wonder if the days of
magic were gone, or if this withdrawal of the
waters was a freak of some revengeful gnome.
A few hours, however, redeems the river. In-
credible as it seems, the water comes hastening
in, up the long miles, until the deep gullies are
full rivers and the ships are afloat and able to
sail wherever they choose.
As one follows up the Annapolis Valley,
North Mountain stretches its long low range
against the sky at the left, while South Moun-
tain runs parallel to it, but lower and more
broken, at the right.
The Annapolis Basin lies long and narrow
between the two low mountain ranges, and at
its head receives the Annapolis River, which
flows through the northern part of the valley,
its course extending in the same general direc-
tion as that of the Basin, making the latter
seem like a sudden expansion of the river.
As we finally left the river we passed over
the low water-shed that separates the Annapolis
from the Cornwallis Valley. The Annapolis
34
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Cannon Field
River flows to the southwest, the rivers of
the Cornwallis Valley to the northeast.
As we crossed the water-shed we entered a
new world of history and romance. The con-
fused events that cluster about Port Royal gave
way to the sinij)le peace of the Acadians, — that
sense of peace which even their sad expulsion
cannot quite drive from our hearts.
As we crossed that little rise of ground we
neared the dike-lands of the Acadians and the
home of Evangeline.
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III
ACADIA
ACADIA is the original French name
for Nova Scotia. It is said to come
from the Indian ca^ie or kadi, which
means " abounding in," and is often
found as an affix in the names of places, as, for
instance, Shubenacadie, " abounding in ground-
nuts," and the euphonious and simple Ap-
chechkumoochwakadi, "abounding in black
ducks."
While " Acadia " was in a general way-
applied to the whole of Nova Scotia, to
most minds it now has a more restricted
meaning.
We think of it as that Utopia where Long-
fellow's Evangeline lived and loved, and whence
her people were driven forth. It is a land of
poetry, reclaimed from the sea by the dikes of
the old Acadian farmers, and by the traveller is
looked for in what is known as the Cornwallis
Valley.
Poetry often vanishes in the presence of the
reality, and one's first thought upon entering
36
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Acadia
the Cornwallis Valley is very likely of the im-
proved appearance of the apples, for along the
line of the railroad they are small and unin-
viting, until the obscure line of water-shed that
separates the Annapolis and Cornwallis Valleys
has been crossed, when a notable change for
the better comes over the orchards.
It was a pleasant, pastoral land through
which the " Flying Bluenose " hurried us, but
for some distance there was nothing remarkable
about it, for we noticed no dikes until we
changed cars at Kentville and were bounced
along the little branch road that leads to Kings-
port, which is situated on Minas Basin.
W^e did not go as far as Kingsport at this
time, however, but stopped a mile short of there
at Canning, a small village with its one long
street lined on the river-side by straggling
shops of a moribund aspect. Large trees and
ample dooryards give Canning a pleasant and
home-like look, and at the rear of the shops
the Habitant River rolls restlessly back and
forth.
The Habitant is a tidal stream, all that is
left of a once mighty flood that brought large
ships to Canning's wharves. Where once the
37
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waters spread are level plains of great fertility,
for the spade of the dike-maker has been at
work, and the chastened Habitant is now a
narrow stream, its winding course bordered by
a narrow green embankment that in the dis-
tance looks like a line of raised embroidery
traversing some gigantic pattern. Beyond the
Habitant lie the reclaimed meadow-lands now
dotted with haystacks.
Beyond the meadows is a lovely stretch of
highlands, the termination of South Mountain.
This was our first view of the dike-lands, and
it took some time to realise the magnitude of
what has been accomp.ished. In fact, it cannot
be understood at this point.
The Habitant is a deep gully of red and
shining mud as we saw it at low tide. Two
or three small sail-boats were lying up high
and dry on its rim. There was but a thread
of muddy water stealing seaward, along the
bottom of the gully, soon to be met and
turned back by the incoming tide of Minas
Basin, that twice every day fills the doomed
Habitant, at its departure leaving another
layer of the red ooze which is slowly but
surely obliterating the channel of the river.
38
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Acadia
Four miles from Canning, on a commanding
spur of North Mountain, is an open space
called Look Off. This is one of the best
points from which to view the dike-lands, and
thither we went one fair day.
North Mountain nowhere attains an alti-
tude of more than six hundred feet, which
scarcely entitles it to the name of mountain.
Yet the view from Look Off is more impres-
sive than many a scene beheld from a higher
point.
North Mountain rises abruptly from the
plain, so that the wide vista of the Cornwallis
Valley lay a vast, fair scene before us. We
looked down upon the far-reaching dike-lands
of the old Acadian farmers, the scene of the
tragedy and romance of their lives, the fair
meadows they had stolen bit by bit from the
sea an imperishable memorial of their labors.
Minas Basin, like the beautiful Annapolis
Basin, is an inlet from the Bay of Fundy. It
forms the northern boundary to the Cornwallis
Valley ; and as the tides come in, higher even
than those in the Annapolis Basin, they flood
the low lands and race up the river channels
ror many mi
les.
39
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Down North and Up Along
Three tidal rivers traverse the length of the
Cornwallis Valley, — the Habitant, which was
the nearest to us, and was seen here and there
like a ribbon of silver ; the Canard, of which
we could catch glimpses ; and the Cornwallis,
farthest away and largest of all, from which
the whole valley gets its name.
These rivers empty into a v,ide bay or lagoon
that encroaches upon the northern border of
the Cornwallis Valley. At high tide this bay
is a sheet of water ; at low tide the red sands
are bare half-way to Minas, and are interspersed
with blue pools and interrupted by the shining
mouths of the three rivers that wind down to
the sea.
The channels of the rivers are deep and nar-
row, and wherever they go through the fertile
valley the patient dikes accompany them,
winding and turning with the winding and
turning of the rivers, unbroken banks of green
grass, frail enough to look at when one thinks
of their mission, yet trusted sentinel;? lo keep
back the water until even Fundy's mighty rush
has been conquered, and the diked rivers are
slowly being silted full and themselves help to
form a barrier against the incoming tides.
40
Acadia
Much of the northern part of the Cornwallis
Valley, which for many miles is mostly low-
land, and was originally salt marsh, has been
reclaimed from the sea, and in many places the
farm-land still lies below high-water mark.
The reclaimed land has not been the work
of a moment nor of a generation. The valley
we see to-day is not the valley the Acadians
first looked upon, nor yet the valley from
which they were finally expelled. Their suc-
cessors have as steadily plied the diking spade
as they did themselves, and the work of re-
claiming new land is still going on wherever
opportunity offers. The breaking of a dike
means inundation and devastation to the land
with a loss of two or three years' crops, as it
takes the earth that long to recover from the
taste of the salt water.
Standing on Look Off we saw the general
outlines of the valley as it is to-day, and saw,
too, in a large way, the method of its emer-
gence from the bottom of the sea. For winding
here and there were gently rounded gullies
down which now ran streams of trees and
bushes, but which once were water-courses
where the retreating tides drained back to
41
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Minas. Little by little the dikes encroached
upon the sea, cutting off first one, then another
of these tidal streams, until only their forms
are now left to tell the story of what they
once were.
The Cornwallis Valley was aglow with
colour the day we saw it from Look Off, —
yellow stubble of oats and barley mingled with
patches of bright red and of vivid green where
vegetables were growing, while apple orchards
everywhere lent their dark green, and clumps
of firs added their black to the scene.
Scattered about were villages nearly hidden
by trees, while detached houses looked like toys
in the fields. Canning's spires showed over
her tree-tops, and Kingsport lay in full view
on the shore of Minas Basin.
In the distance, beyond the shine of the
Cornwallis River, lay Grand Pre, the scene of
the Great Expulsion, the home of Evangeline,
the central point of interest for all that region.
We looked at the blur ^'^ ^^ distant hillside
which we were told v Pre, with a rush
of emotion. .. mei the poetry and
romance of the ,ist re .aced the prose of the
present. But our th ughts soon returned to
42
Acadia
the actual scene before us : the opening of the
five rivers was a fairy picture, so dainty was
the blue and green of the water against the
faint red sands.
For the three tidal rivers are not all the
rivers we see from our high place. From
behind a long point of land in the distance
over by Grand Pre shines the silvery mouth
of the Gaspereaux, which flows through a
valley of the same name behind the high-
land that far away looks so blue, and the
broad mouth of the Avon makes up like a
wide bay into the distant land.
At our very feet is the valley of the Pereau.
But where is the river Pereau ? It is where the
Habitant and the Canard will one day be ;
for where once a tidal river guided the waters
back to the sea are now green meadows.
The Pereau has been diked down to within
an inch of its life and within a mile of the sea.
This broad little mile-long river has a pretty
curved dike across its head. It cannot reach
above the dike, and it can hardly reach to it,
for this stern dike has not only cut off all
advance, but is the cause of the filling in of
what little of the river is left. And one day
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they will bniUl w dike yet lower, and then
fttiothcr and another, until the IVrcau Kivcr,
like the Acavhans themselves, will he hut a
name. It is very pretty at the month of the
Pcreaii. Kck\ dill's staml out in the water free
from the mainland, and what banks the river
has left are steep and red.
The shores of Minas arc steep, and are evi-
dently the sourec from which the dike-lands
have received their fertile soil. The red rocks
of the ct)ast have been reduced hy the irresist-
ible force of the water to the red nuui of the
fields. 'I'he tide for ages has swept in, turbid
with particles of the rocks it has ground to
powder, at\il as its waters ilrained slowlv back
to the sea, red mud has been left on the plains
and in the rivers.
There is talk of building a monster dike
across the mouth of the lagoon into which the
three tidal riv^crs empty, thus reclaiming a vast
tract of land at one effort. If this is done,
good-bye to the Habitant, the Canard, and the
CornwalHs. They would be in worse plight
than the Pereau is now, for there won hi not
be so much as a trace of their turbid tide-
waters left It would be a pity to obliterate
Acadia
fc^ — - — — . — — . 1 . ■
these rivers. (>uecr gushes iiv the soil with
their strcjims constiiiitly turncci i)y the god-
dess who rules the tides, Aeauia would not
be Aeiuliji without them.
7'hink of h.'iving to consult the almanac or
look out of the window to see whether the
river that flows through your town happens
to be running up stream or down, or not at
all 1 Yet this is what the dweller in Acadia
nuist do when he wishes to float his boat.
Fortunately for the I labitant, the Canard,
and the Cornwallis, there is a good deal of
red tape involved in building a new dike, so
they may breathe freely for yet a time. May
they long continue to run uphill, then run
down, then run dry, in their present agreeable
fashion! Not all of them run dry, however;
some have a fresh-water stream of their own ;
and where this is the case they can never be
diked wholly out of existence.
We had noticed very little wild life of any
kind in Nova Scotia. Hirds there may be in
the spring, but at this time their forms were
seldom seen. The most noticeable creatures
were small grasshoppers with large ideas of
the value of noise. Each appeared to be pos-
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sessed of an indestructible pair of clappers
upon which it played a resounding rat-tat-tat
at short intervals. They started from under
our feet at Digby and fled from before us at
Look Off
It was some time before we could really
believe the loud and regular rattle came from
such tiny performers. We should have liked
to see them working their clappers, but could
not catch them at it, nor catch them at all, they
were so overloaded with suspicion, and when
v/e were yet far away scurried off rat-tatting to
yet safer distances.
It was on sunny Look Off that we made our
first and ordy acquaintance 'vith Nova Scotia
bees. While lying on the ground we had
noticed a distinct odour of honey, for which
we could not account, as there were no flowers
near.
At first too full of the beauties of the Corn-
wallis Valley to see anything else, we finally
noticed numbers of tiny gray gauzy-winged bees
flying about and hovering over the ground near
us. The ground was perforated in all direc-
tions with round holes into which here and there
a bee disappeared, her hindmost legs laden with
46
Acadia
balls of bright yellow pollen. It soon dawned
upon us that we were lying at our ease upon a
colony of bees* nests, — a position more novel
than assuring. The bees did not offer to sting
us, although we were sadly interfering with their
domestic duties by covering up their holes.
As soon as we realised the state of affairs, we
departed in as orderly a manner as was com-
patible with extreme haste. Curiosity, how-
ever, compelled us to dig out one of the holes.
The little hole went down for some distance in
a straight line and then turned and for an inch
or two ran parallel to the surface, then went
down for a short distance in a slanting direc-
tion. About half-way down the long gallery,
we dug out Madam Bee, very much flustered,
and overwhelmed with grief and indignation.
At the termination to the gallery we found
a mass of pollen about as large as a white bean
and enclosed in a glistening case, looking like
a very delicate pupa case, and made, no doubt,
from a secretion from the bee's mouth. This
little object when crushed had a strong odour of
honey and also a slight odour of cheese. Into
this mass of nutriment the bee had doubtless
deposited her egg. It must have taken a long
47
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time and a vast amount of hard ' vork to dig
that long gallery through the hard earth and
collect that mass of pollen and honey bit by
bit from distant flowers.
As we looked at the ruins of a once happy
home, we felt the self-satisfied regret of the
conqueror at the discomfiture of the conquered.
The self-control of the bees was remarkable.
They flew about us in preat excitement, but
their anger was not of that stinging nature which
makes one so anxious to respect the privacy of
bees. One flew at M. and administered a
sharp admonitory rap on the cheek, but used
no more pointed argument.
The Christian fortitude of these bees might
have made us uncomfortably ashamed of our
part in the adventure, had it not occurred to us
in time that possibly the reason for their for-
bearance was not because they were good, but
because they were stingless.
This thought recalled the picture of Hum-
boldt sitting on the mountain-side above
Caracas, where small hairy stingless bees crawled
over his hands. These bees were called
Angelitos" by the natives; and we on North
Mountain also met our Angelitos.
48
(C
IV
ACADIA'S CROPS
THE people say, with as much mod-
esty as the statement allows, that the
land reclaimed from the sea is the
most fertile in the world. One goes
there, expecting he scarcely knows what in the
way of luxuriant vegetation, and is astonished
to find this remarkable fertility and endless
boasting devoted to — hay !
Hay is no doubt a very good thing — in its
way. Still, one does not expect to find it the
main crop of " the richest soil on earth," when,
too, that favoured soil is decidedly limited in
quantity. We were heretofore accustomed to
think of hay as an agricultural product ob-
tained from the dooryards and fence corners
and a few hay-fields here and there where
the land was not needed for more important
crops.
There are no wheat-fields in the Cornwallis
Valley ; the people say they can raise wheat,
but are full of excuses for not doing it. The
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truth is, wheat does not thrive as well as hay.
Every effort was made to impress upon us the
marvellous fertility of the soil — expressed in
terms of hay. They told us .hey cut three
tons to the acre. But they might as well have
said thirty, such was on • ignorance concerning
Nova Scotia's favourite crop, and we neither
looked nor were the least astonished. Our
indifference troubled them, and from the ques-
tions they asked we suspect they feared we
knew of a place in "America" where more
was cut.
Before we left the Cornwallis Valley, the
mists of our Ignorance had been penetrated by
the light of knowledge. In spite of ourselves
we finally acquired a certain reverence for hay
and a proper appreciation of three tons to the
acre. M. was quickly reconciled to it because
the stacks were so pretty, and the shorn
meadow-land was lovely in the autumn land-
scape. It is not probable the people them-
selves consume hay ; but what do they do with
it ? For there are no fiocks or herds to be
seen. And what else can they consume, when
their broad and fertile lands are broad and
fertile hay-fields ? Hay and apples !
so
Acadia s Crops
Acadia's crop was a fragrant one at least, and
if we could not at once appreciate three tons of
hay to the acre, we were able to grasp the
meaning of a hundred barrels of apples to the
acre, which netted the farmer two dollars a
barrel. That was better than raising oranges
in Florida. We happened to know something
about the latter occupation, and for a moment
coveted Nova Scotia's orchards in exchange
for certain groves whose golden hopes had
never blossomed into realities.
It was something of a comfort to know the
Cornwallis Valley apple-trees require almost as
much petting as Florida oranges, — that they
are subject to disease and parasite and have to
be scrubbed and scraped, and, for f^'l we know
to the contrary, sprayed occasionaJ)
It had always seemed to us as though apple-
trees happened^ as though they grew by some
special law of their own and asked nothing of
man but room to stand in. But this is not so.
If man wants fair apples, he must needs look
to his trees.
The apple-trees of Acadia are not the gnarled
and delightful friends of our New England
childhood. They have regular rounded crowns,
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and, in spite of :-ome wilful turnings of tough
limbs, are on the whole rather conventional
and strait-laced apple-trees.
The orchards have something of the regu-
larity which so displeases at one's first sight
of an orange grove. But the orchards are
more picturesque than the groves, because an
apple-tree, no matter how well bred, never can
escape a touch of wilfulness.
Usually apple-trees growing near the sea
depart very decidedly from the inland form.
On the more exposed parts of Cape Cod, for
instance, where they can be persuaded to grow
at all, they act in a most grotesque manner.
As if afraid to raise their heads for fear of
having them blown off, they branch out close
to the ground, and sometimes have a crown as
broad as an ordinary full-grown tree and a
trunk only a few inches in height.
Others, as if trying to get above the winds,
or as if their fibres had been drawn out by
them, grow tall and narrow with a crown that
often leans away from the prevailing winds.
These are the sort that make certain parts of
Rhode Island so picturesque.
But the Nova Scotia apple-trees keep to
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Acadia s Crops
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their ancestral form as a rule, though we did
see some orchards not far from Minas, where
the crowns had turned over in defiance of law
and order, until the branches on the lower
side touched the ground. It gave them a
rakish air, as though they had their hats
cocked on one side, and made them look
very jolly.
Apples were not ripe when we were among
the orchards, but they were nearly grown, and
showed what they would become. Either it
pays as well to care for apple-trees as for any-
thing else, or Nova Scotia apples are, if not,
as their owners modestly claim, the very best
apples in the world, yet very fine apples in-
deed. For, as we noticed when first seeing
them, they are fair, well formed, and uniform
in size. One almost never sees a gnarled or
spotted apple on these trees.
The apples themselves are hard and crisp,
as though they knew a thing or two, and felt
the responsibility of preparing themselves for
a trip to London, or to the West Indies,
where they find their market. They retain
their crispness when ripe, and are juicy and
good in flavour, as we had opportunity to dis-
ss
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cover later. They command higher prices at
home than abroad ; at least we bought them in
Baddeck at the rate of six dollars a barrel.
The Nova Scotians complain that they can-
not get good apples because the best are sent
to England. Discrimination against home
consumers and in favour of foreign markets is
not peculiar to Nova Scotia, however. One
hears the same story the world over wherever
the commodities of a place are exported.
We recall the apology of a Florida Cracker
from whom we tried to buy some early vege-
tables: "We have none that are fit to eat.
We shipped all the best. All that we could n't
ship we fed to the pigs, and what the pigs
would n't eat we ate ourselves."
London pays well where apples are good, but
does not take her fruit upon faith even from
her loyal provinces, as a certain farmer learned
to his cost. The story goes that he shipped
his apples as they grew, best and poorest to-
gether, but by some chance the best were on
top. In London each barrel was tested,
clear to the bottom^ and all of his were rejected.
Thus he lost his whole crop plus the cost of
transportation, a calamity which ruined him
54
Acadia s Crops
m
past recovery. We were very sorry to hear
such a story of an Acadian farmer.
Kingsport is only one mile from Canning.
It is on Minas Basin and is the port whence
many of the Cornwallis Valley apples are
shipped.
Potatoes are also shipped from here in large
quantities, and the Cornwallis Valley farmer, we
were told, is the aristocrat of the Lower Prov-
inces. His neighbours accuse him of having
grown lazy under prosperity, and pretend to
look scornfully upon hiis sloth, though one
suspects this attitude is but the cloak to a
secret envy.
Apples and potatoes do come easy in the
Cornwallis Valley, and the necessity for work
is the cause of work the world over, still, we
have seen lazier people in our travels than the
Cornwallis Valley farmers.
Naturally the people In this part of the
country do not look with favour upon annexa-
tion. They say, " Look at the American
farmer, then look at us ! " One does not like
to look at the American farmer and then look
at them.
The farmer here is the man of the com-
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munity, he is rich, — in a mild way, — and he
is sure of a comfortable living from his well-
tilled acres. He feeds the rest of the world,
and in return is allowed enough to eat himself.
In the towns, we are told, it is different.
The struggle there is severe, and the people
do not look with disfavour upon annexation.
They have a sort of undefined feeling that an-
nexation would somehow turn the stream of
the farmer's prosperity into the coffers of the
townspeople. It is very likely it would.
Kingsport is a convenient place from which
to visit Parrsboro, on the other shore of Minas,
as a boat runs between the two places.
It is a pity to cut the Acadian country in
two by interpolating Parrsboro between the
region about Canning and the Grand Pre
portion, but it is very much the easier way.
As the narrator, however, is not, like the trav-
eller, influenced by considerations of time or of
cost, Parrsboro shall wait its turn, and Grand
Pre stand where it belongs geographically and
historically.
ii
S6
GRAND PRfi
WAS it an accident, or the kindly
guidance of the Spirit of Romance
that led us to enter Grand Pre on
the fifth of September, the very date
of the expulsion of the Acadians ?
Grand Pre lies on a hillside overlooking the
Cornwallis Valley, but on the opposite side of
the valley from North Mountain and the
Look Off. From it one sees Canning and
Kentville in the distance, where they lie in
their meadows between it and North Mountain.
It is a small and quiet village as one sees it
to-day, its houses still stretching down one
long street, as was probably the fashion of
times gone by, when Grand Pre was the home
of the Acadians and the thatched roofs of the
farmhouses straggled from the Grand Pre of
to-day to Horton's Landing on Minas' shore,
a mile or more away.
The houses now are less picturesque than
the Acadian homes, for their roofs are not
thatehed, and they do not depart often enough
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yi—ii.i.i, „ — i.i.,.i I I — - I I — " ■ ■■ I.I. I —
from the prim and painted Digby type to make
the village as attractive as it might be. Still,
the houses here are, on the whole, better than
any we have yet seen, and there is many a
charming sketch to he found in this, the
most famous spot in the Lower Provinces, or
for that matter in all Canada, for nowhere else
in British America have history and poetry
combined in so wonderful a manner to roman-
ticise a place.
On a high hill at the edge of the village is
a comfortable inn, once a charming old house
with a quaint doorway, but now obscured and
vulgarised by a new addition which has noth-
ing to recommend it but its internal comfort
and the unparalleled views from its many
windows.
From this hill-top the Cornwallis Valley is
seen stretching into the far distance, a vision
of beauty, as it lies with the changing light on
its distant meadows and its salt marshes glow-
ing with rich colour, '^'or not all the marsh-
land has been reclaimed ; there still are broad
reaches of exquisite beauty, to delight the eye
and tempt the farmer of the future to new
leclamations.
'■^S
Grand Pre
?
At one*s feet lie those broad meadows of
Grand Pre, for from these prairies the place
derived its name. Far away shine the spires
of the village churches.
Beyond the valley and the villages is the
wall of North Mountain, stopping abruptly at
Minas* deep waters> its bold front of Blomidon
defying the rushing tides.
Minas Basin with its surging waters lies
blue in the distance, deceptively smiling and
peaceful seeming, on a fair day, like a calm
spirit that nothing could perturb. Beyond
Minas rise the low mountains of the Cobequid
range.
Not only the Cornwallis Valley lies revealed
from this favoured spot, but wide reaches of
country are seen in all directions, the high-
lands across the Gaspereaux vying in loveliness
with the beautiful valley.
Meadow-land and orchard, barley and oat
fields, smile before the doors of Grand Pre
much as they did in the old times. Only then
there were wheat and flax fields ; and flocks of
sheep and herds of horses and cattle were also
far more numerous, if the stories of those old
times are true. To-day the people get their
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wheat and linen elsewhere, and the flocks and
herds for the most part find pasture in more
distant and less fertile places.
Many of the houses of Grand Pre are shin-
gled to the ground, and some are moss-grown
and gray as well, and the village has a certain
distinction from the tall columns of Lombardy
poplars that stand about. These poplars were
brought by the French from their home across
the sea; and wherever in Nova Scotia one sees
these tall straight trees, he may be sur*" that
they mark the site of what was once an Aca-
dian village.
At Grand Pre, too, are the Acadian willows,
not only picturesque in themselves, but wearing
an air of romance and poetry that enriches the
whole scene. It is hard to believe we live in
the things of to-day in the presence of the wil-
lows of Grand Pre. There are a few very eld
and very decrepit ones on the road leading
from the railway station toward the town.
They can be regarded with unstinted emotion
and unbridled imagination, for there can be no
doubt that they were really put there by French
hands as much as a hundred and fifty years ago,
and have witnessed the tragic scenes that make
60
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the history of this part of the country so
memorable.
But it is in a meadow upon which the rail-
way station faces that the interest of to-day
chiefly centres. Across a wide field is to be
seen a row of willows, and near them is an old
French well, of course called Evangeline's well.
There is no question about the antiquity of the
well. It is as genuine as the willows, and if
the pilgrim wishes to touch its sacred water
with his finger-tips one does not see how harm
could follow. But the stranger who gazes into
the depths of the well will think twice before
he follows the advice of certain sentimental
guide-books and drinks from the sparkling
waters that once had kissed Evangeline's lovely
lips.
Either the water has changed since the well
was dug — at this period of time it may need
cleaning — or else it was used to water the
cattle. It is not a large well nor a deep one,
and the walls are of stone. When we saw it,
it had no cover, two or three boards being laid
crosswise to prevent the unwary from tumbling
in, or, it may be, to mark its site for the curious
and eager pilgrim.
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Not far from the well are what are supposed
to be the foundations of buildings, one of which
is said to be the site of the very chapel in which
the Acadian men were imprisoned.
Not long since some blacksmith's tools were
dug up near here, which of course fired the
imaginations of all who heard of it, and it was
at once averred the site of the village smithy
had been discovered, doubtless the very spot
where Basil the blacksmith wrought.
Some one in Grand Pre, we were told, has a
collection of old French relics which he is will-
ing to show to any one interested.
The field in which lies the well is traversed
by foot-paths worn by the coming and going
of visitors. In some parts of the world this
field would be enclosed and an entrance fee
charged ; but so simple a means of amassing
wealth has not occurred to the " lazy " Corn-
wallis Valley farmer who owns it. He simply
works the land the sight-seer has not tramped
down too hard to be worked, and leaves
this field to the fate it has brought upon
itself.
There is another clump of very large wil-
lows in the well-meadow, near the fence by the
62
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Grand Pre
station. They are veterans indeed of the most
fantastic forms and positions, some of them
having literally lain down in order to endure
the ^ ress of years a little longer.
But the finest willows in Grand Pre border
an old roadway, which now runs through the
middle of a farm, and which is fenced in with
barbed wire. This roadway is near the field of
the well, and the owner of it cordially pointed it
out and invited us to walk through it, instruct-
ing us concerning a hole in the fence through
which we could enter without difficulty.
This way of the willows was charming.
They were mighty willows, hollow and twisted.
The limbs were as large as the trunks in some
cases, and they were pervaded with a flower-
like fragrance which we had never noticed in
willows before, unless perhaps in blooming-
time in the spring. This odour came from the
leaves, and we wondered if it might be the
exhalations of poetry.
The old roadway is broad and in some
places seems to have been elevated. There
are piles of stones near it which are doubtless
the remains of the foundations of old French
houses. There is a pervading sense of peace
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about the quiet fields and these worn old
trees, which harmonises with our conceptions
of Acadian life.
From Grand Pre to Horton*s Landing is a
pleasant walk of about a mile, but pleasanter
than Horton's Landing itself is a grassy lane
near there, which ends at a stile upon which
one can sit and look at the broad marshes and
meadow-lands where the Gaspereaux winds
through red mud at low tide to empty into
the near waters of Minas, and at high tide is
lost in the sea that covers the sands.
The lowlands near the mouth of the Gas-
pereaux formed a combination of meadow and
marsh lands which we could not understand.
There were dikes, but they seemed incom-
plete and ineffectual, and later we learned
how a great storm had broken through and
let in the sea, and how these dikes, whose
cost of repair so close to turbulent Minas
had made them a questionable blessing, had
not been rebuilt. Remnants of them are
seen, but the triumphant tides have it all
their own way, and once more the yellow
marsh grass decorates the rich red soil.
Wherever accessible, the marsh grass is cut
64
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Grand Pre
and preserved, and picturesque haycocks stand
on stilts over the marshes, but the value of
the salt hay is little compared to the opulence
of the meadow-land when protected from the
sting of the brine.
Situated as Grand Pre Is, on a ridge at the
extreme eastern edge of the Cornwallis Valley,
the views everywhere ibout are fine.
Wolfville, the kigest town of that region,
is only three miles away on the same ridge.
It is a college town, containing several institu-
tions for training the mental and spiritual
man and woman, being blessed as well with
a Young Ladies' Seminary. It Is rather an
attractive-looking place with Its many shade-
trees, and from It may be obtained a fine view
of the Cornwallis Valley.
Being plentifully supplied with boarding-
houses and accommodation of all sorts for
the summer tourist, it is the general stopping-
place, Grand Pre being a Mec:a to which the
tourists pour in crowds, to gaze, perchance
to worship, at Evangeline's shrine, to shed a
tear, and go their way.
The drive between Wolfville and Grand
Pre is beautiful enough to entice the pleasure-
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seeker, even if there were no such goal as
Grand Pre at the end. There are two roads
between Grand Pre and Wolfville, — one at
the foot of the ridge, and the other along its
crest. The drive over the upper road is one
to remember.
Up hill and down we went, past farm-
houses and through avenues of fragrant firs
and spruces, as wild a woods road as heart
could wish, and then of a sudden we found
ourselves looking down into the Valley of the
Gaspereaux. It is not a broad, calm expanse
like the Cornwallis Valley, but a sweet sun-
filled vale with the river sparkling and wind-
ing through the middle.
The Gaspereaux is not a mighty flood, and
it has no dignity to speak of. It babbles and
prattles over its stones like a summer brook,
is crossed here and there by a red-and-white
bridge ; and near its mouth it is disturbed and
discoloured by the intruding tides of Fundy, that
come prying as far as they can into the affairs
of the Gaspereaux, and cause dikes to be built
to shut their fatal salt embrace away from its
lower marshes.
Groups of willows are scattered through the
66
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Grand Pre
valley, and farms on gentle slopes lie basking
in the quiet sunshine. Apples are ripening
everywhere. All is bright, sweet, and peace-
ful, and we drive on with a feeling of calm
pleasure until the fairy valley is left behind,
and on the other side of us once more spread
the splendid reaches of the Cornwallis Valley.
Once more, and from another point of view,
we see our old friends. Canning and Kentville
and Kingsport, while close at hand lies Wolf-
ville.
We see again the far-off wall of North
Mountain standing sentinel over the fertile
valley, and holding back the fogs of Fundy,
that roll up from the Bay and look over the
mountain into the valley, but dare not venture
down to blight its vegetation with their cold
and damp presence.
Port Williams is a tiny settlement not far from
Wolfville, and we see it lying near the mouth
of the Cornwallis River, its wharves and vessels
telling of its maritime life, for up to its wharves
come schooners at flood-tide to bear away the
apples and potatoes of the region round about.
At low tide the schooners comport themselves
with what dignity they may with their keels in
67
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the mud and their high sides uncovered to the
gaze of the curious.
There are little groves of plum-trees all
about Wolfville and the surrounding country.
There are plums at Grand Pre and in the Gas-
pereaux Valley, but not so many as at Wolf-
ville. The orchards there were blue with
ripening fruit. The trees were bending and
almost breaking under the burden. Blue
plums were dominant, but there were also red
and white ones.
The farmhouses looked neat, and were often
picturesque or pretty, and everywhere were
orchards of ripening apples and little groves
of dark blue plums.
We missed the flowers that made Digby so
charming. Flowers were not abundant here,
and where they did occur they were meagre
and commonplace, and in no way characteristic
of Acadia.
To Digby belong her fish-flakes and her
flowers ; Acadia has her dike-lands, her
orchards, and her romance.
i 1
68
VI
nl
EVANGELINE
THERE are two villages of Grand
Pre. One lies on the slopes beyond
the Cornwallis with the broad valley
smiling before her doors. The other
was founded by Longfellow and lies in the
hearts of his readers and within the glowing
lines of poetry, enveloped by the mists of
romance.
It is difficult to separate the two ; and the
Grand Pre of reality is pervaded by a charm
not her own from association with the Grand
Pre of the poet. Lying on the hill-top above
Grand Pre and looking over the peaceful
meadow-lands on a summer day, we cease to
behold the present scene, and the poet's fancy
rises to take its place.
We read the page before us, and the forest
primeval occupies the neighbouring hills in
spite of the fact that not a forest tree is now on
them • and we listen gratefully to the murmur-
ing pines and the hemlocks, although there are
not enough pine-trees in all Nova Scotia to
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murmur effectively, and it is a question as to
whether they ever flourished near Grand Pre.
Still, in our imagination they are there, and
we shall no doubt learn that the image we have
so long held of them is far more enduring than
are our memories of Grand Pre as we saw it in
reality.
As we read on out of the poet's book we live
in a strange dream-world, where ever and anon
the modern English houses are blotted out and
along the single street of Grand Pre straggle
the poet's houses with their overhanging
thatched roofs, their dormer windows, and their
quaint doorways.
In spite of the stones lying prone in the
meadow by the well, we see the chapel with its
uplifted cross, not on the lowlands, but on the
side of the ridge, where in our imagination the
quaint and comfortable houses stand. We know
exactly what mound it occupied and how the
houses were grouped about it. In spite of the
coffins recently exhumed from th6 meadow
below, we know the burying-ground of our
Grand Pre lies by the wall of our chapel.
The broad-eaved barns, low-thatched and
bursting with the harvest, cluster like separate
70
Evangeline
id
te
villages each about its farmhouse, as the poet
has shown them to us.
Down toward Horton's Landing — apart, as
the poet has set it, and as it should be — is the
peaceful and charming home of Evangeline.
There in the broad-beamed house she lives
with her father. We see her as distinctly as
we see the young girl of to-day passing along
the street, far more distinctly, for we shall for-
get the young girl, but Evangeline's face and
form will linger in our minds for ever.
We know her as well as we know the
members of our household, and here in Grand
Pre she seems very near to us. V/e know she
is sitting at her spinning-wheel down there by
Horton's Landing, in the home of her father
with its oaken beams. She is fair, and bright
with the sparkle of French vivacity that plays
in her black eyes, which flash and soften with
succeeding emotions.
She is clad in the picturesque attire of her
country people ; and in the corner near her is
the great loom where she sits through the
winter, weaving cloth for the family and laying
up piles of linen against a day that is nearing,
and about which she is dreaming.
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We too dream as we read. We see her not
only in her home but abroad on Sunday, wend-
ing her way to the chapel, clad in her blue
kirtle and wearing her Norman cap and ances-
tral ornaments. We see her townspeople in
bright colours about her, but she is not of them ;
she stands alone, something rare in this world,
precious to us in a deep and primal sense.
Whether the poet meant it or not, in
Evangeline he has given us not an individual,
but a type. She does not belong to any time
or to any place; she is the great, patient, suffer-
ing type of womanhood which shall outlive
nations and races. We follow her with rever-
ence, not because she is a village maiden, fair
and gentle, but because of her awful mission,
because of her triumph over circumstance and
failure, and because in Evangeline's hand-to-
hand struggle with the adverse forces of this
world, we each discern our own battle.
We linger in imagination with Evangeline
in her youth. We lovingly watch her as she
moves about and is greeted by the villagers
with the same reverence we ourselves feel for
her. They do not know why they feel thus
to this young girl ; but we know, for they too
72
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Evangeline
are the creatures of our imagination, and over
them all we have cast the spell of Evangeline's
future. They too go forth and suffer, but we
do not think of that ; we follow only the figure
the poet has shown us and the one life he
has illumined.
We see Gabriel, Evangeline's lover, but he
is less well defined. Perhaps more clearly
stands out Gabriel's father, Basil the black-
smith, and Evangeline's own sunny-hearted
and well-loved sire. These people are all, to
our imagination, of superior clay; they are the
well beloved of the poet, they and all their
neighbours.
It is from the first pages of Longfellow's
" Evangeline" we get that sense of peace and
blessedness which has confused Acadia with
Arcadia in the minds of so many.
From our place on the hillside, the magic
book in our hand, we watch the peaceful days
glide by, we see the coming home of the herds
at night, and listen to the love-song of Evan-
geline as she awaits the coming of her lover
Gabriel. We witness the betrothal and attend
the feast, and listen lightly to the ominous
rumours of hostile import.
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We know what is to come., yet the poet's
magic chains us to the joyful present. We
think only of Evangeline and Gabriel, — she
filled with deep and holy joy at the approach-
ing perfection of her womanhood, and he filled
with love and ambition for her. We know
their hopes will never be realised, yet we re-
joice as they do, as though we were, like them,
oblivious of the future.
While we are still lying on our hillside, a
change comes over the face of Grand Pre. It
is the fall of the year, and the deep peace of the
happy valley is broken by the noise of drums
and the wailing of women and children.
Evangeline's father, Basil the blacksmith,
Gabriel, and all the men of the village are
imprisoned in the chapel, where they had been
summoned to hear the will of their masters ;
and the fiat has gone forth that the French
Acadians shall be driven away as exiles, their
homes and their property confiscated to the
English Crown.
There is something so cruelly inhuman in
this decree and in the scenes that follow, as
the poet has portrayed them, that we forget the
facts of history and are carried away by the
74
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Evangeline
same rushing tide of feeling that overwhelmed
the victims. Our indignation blazes with theirs
and our tears flow with them, as we go from
house to house and see the misery that has in
a moment overtaken our Acadia, our Isles of
the Blessed.
We execrate the terrible decree in spite of
the excuses history presents, for here we are
not in the realm of history. We are in the
poet's land of Acadia, and these cherished peo-
ple are being wantonly scattered and destroyed,
driven forth without cause and without right of
appeal.
Over there, where we can see the shining
mouth of the Gaspereaux, the English ships
are waiting. Cruel hands guard the men in
the chapel while the women bear their house-
hold goods to the shore.
And now Evangeline begins the fulfilment
of that sacred promise of her future. She does
not wait to weep, nor does she fall in despair.
Over her seventeen summers of gracious youth
is suddenly dropped the mantle of life's tragedy,
which she never more will cast aside.
The past held a delusion, although she does
not know it yet ; her womanhood must be per-
75
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fected, not through the fulfilment of her dearest
hope, but through abnegation of all she most
desires ; and she applies herself to the care
of her neighbours, comforting and helping
them, and thus in a measure stilling her own
pain.
The tragedy of Grand Pre hastens to a con-
clusion. The prisoners are marched under
guard to the ships. We see the long line of
them, the young men first, their faces set and
grim, and their powerful muscles strained but
helpless to serve them against the oppressor.
For a moment Evangeline flashes before our
eyes ; she is in the arms of Gabriel. Our hearts
are oppressed with the doom which we know has
fallen, but herS;, in spite of the horrible situation,
is sustained by the hope of sharing her exile with
her beloved.
She cannot remain with him now, for later in
the procession is a bent old form, her once
joyous-hearted father, whom she now scarcely
recognises, so frightfully have the hours of
misery told upon him, and to whose side she
hastens.
Again we see her, momentarily overcome by
the death of her father, who, broken-hearted,
76
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Evangeline
is laid to rest on the shore of Minas by the
loving hands of the stricken neighbours.
Night falls, and we watch the people by their
fires on the shore ; it is their last night, and
they sit in dumb misery. In a moment a thrill
of anguish and horror passes over our own
nerves as it did over theirs, for along the strag-
gling street of Grand Pre an ominous light
shines.
The cruel flame-storm spreads and rages, its
passion fed by the thatched roofs of the Aca-
dian homes. This is the last drop, and the
voices of the people are raised in shrieks and
groans of utter despair.
Again we see Evangeline, no longer a care-
free girl but a full-dowered woman, accepting
her womanhood and perfecting it in the fire of
her great affliction. It is her voice that com-
forts and her hand that sustains, and young and
old turn to her in appealing reverence, knowing
now the cause of their joy in her.
In that miserable camp on the shore stands
not Evangeline, but Womanhood.
Lying on the sunny bank, we watch those
ships of the land of romance sail away from the
mouth of the Gaspereaux. We scarce see the
77
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silver river more plainly than the imagined
ships, and crowded on their insufficient decks
are the once happy Acadians.
Evangeline is there, alone in the world.
Her father lies by the sea, her lover is on
another ship, for in the confusion of embark-
ing, the cruel haste and the urging, they were
separated.
We watch the ships sail down Minas Basin
toward Blomidon. We watch them disappear
around the bold front of the rocky bluff; and
we know that Evangeline's and Gabriel's ships
took different courses, and that these two wan-
dered over the earth the rest of their lives
in search of each other, not despairing and not
staying the hand because the heart ached.
They laboured for others while struggling ever
onward toward the goal they both sought.
We put down the oft-read poem with dim
eyes. Our hearts go out, not to Evangeline,
but to the whole world of suffering humanity,
whose representative she is. Longfellow seized
upon an event in history but to give living
form to a universal truth.
We know the Grand Pre before us is not
the imagined scene of his beautiful poem, yet
78
Evangeline
we cannot see the old willows and the straight
poplars planted by the hands of the early-
French settlers without emotion.
We cannot gaze upon the broad meadows
before the door of Grand Pre without remem-
bering the hands that first held back the sea.
Nor would we if we could.
Suppose the real Acadians were not the folk
of the poet's fancy ; suppose the emotion
expended upon their sad history does not
wholly belong to them, — still, even had it been
deserved, their fate was terrible, and their suf-
ferings were such as will ever appeal to the
heart of humanity.
Their history was at least the rough material
out of which a divine form was fashioned by
the poet.
79
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VII
THE ACADIANS
IF we have listened with exaltation to the
Muse of Poetry, let us now turn to a
graver Muse, that of History, and hear
what she has to tell us of the Acadians
and their exile.
There must be in history excuse for the
atrocities represented in the story of the poet.
In order to understand events, it is necessary
first to make allowance for the theory, now,
perhaps, beginning to be disbelieved, that a
king or a government can own and control
distant lands never seen or in any way im-
proved by them ; and that those who till the
soil of these lands and who make their homes
in them are the creatures of these distant
powers.
The story, briefly told, is this. After the
great continent of North America was discov-
ered, it was, as all know, eagerly settled by
colonies from France and England.
Instead of allowing the new world to belong
to those who settled it, its resources to be by
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The Acadians
them developed and controlled, and the new
society governed by its members, France and
England both assumed to be the owners, and
each tried to drive the other away and gain the
sole control. The consequence was innumer-
able difficulties and much bloodshed.
Acadia, being one of the principal doors to
the new world, was a favourite bone of conten-
tion, unfortunately for the poor creatures who
had settled there.
In 17 13 the treaty of Utrecht was signed
between France and England, and among other
provisions Acadia was ceded to Great Britain.
Acadia then meant not only Nova Scotia
and New Brunswick, but also some adjacent
country, and did not include Cape Breton and
Prince Edward Island, which France looked
upon as her own.
In the treaty of Utrecht it was agreed that
the French settlers in Acadia should be allowed
to remain on their lands if they chose, and
should be free to practise the Roman Catholic
faith. If they preferred to move, they were to
be allowed to do so any time within a ysar.
Few moved, and at the end of the year those
remaining were requested to take the oath of
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allegiance to King George. At once there was
trouble, for the Acadians, although they had
been transferred to English jurisdiction by the
great treaty of Utrecht, had not thereby been
changed from Frenchmen into Englishmen ;
that was something the treaty was not able to
accomplish, and they declined to take the oath
of allegiance to England.
The French had built a strong fort at Louis-
burg, on the eastern coast of Cape Breton, and
were not at all unwilling that the Acadians
should rebel against English authority — quite
the contrary. Having given up Acadia, there
was nothing, we may well suDpose, they so much
wanted as to get it back again, and that the
Acadians should help them to do this.
We have seen the Acadians in the trans-
forming light of poetry, and they were a very
agreeable people ; now we must lock upon them
in the prosaic light of history, which does not
soften the angles or enrich the colours ; if any-
thing, it intensifies the external hardness of
appearances.
Parkman, in the first volume of his " Mont-
calm and Wolfe," gives us this picture of
them : —
82
'The Acadians
" They were a simple and very ignorant peasantry,
industrious and frugal till evil days came to discourage
them ; living aloof from the world with little of that
spirit of adventure which an easy access to the vast
fur-bearing interior had developed in their Canadian
kindred ; having few wants and those of the rudest ;
fishing a little, and hunting in winter, but chiefly
employed in cultivating the meadows along the river
Annapolis, or rich marshes reclaimed by dikes from
the tides of the Bay of Fundy. The British Govern-
ment left them entirely free of taxation. They made
clothing of flax and wool of their own raising, hats
of similar materials, and shoes or moccasins of moose
and seal skin. They had cattle, sheep, hogs, and
horses in abundance, and the Valley of the Annapolis,
then as now, was known for the profusion and excel-
lence of its apples.
" For drink they had cider or brewed spruce-beer.
" French officials describe their dwellings as wretched
wooden boxes, without ornaments or conveniences,
and scarcely supplied with the most necessary furni-
ture. Two or more families often occupied the same
house ; and their way of life, though simple and vir-
tuous, was by no means remarkable for cleanliness.
Such as it was, contentment reigned among them,
undisturbed by what modern America calls progress.
" Marriages were early, and population grew
apace."
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Here we have a new and very different pic-
ture of our Grand Pre. It is difficult indeed
to transfer the people described by Parkman
to the scene we look upon from our hillside
and which has so recently been the theatre of
Evangeline's drama. Yet let us once n*ore
dream a dream. Along the one street of
Grand Pre straggle the homes of the French
peasantry. They are rude wooden structures,
picturesque enough, no doubt, with their heavy
thatched roofs, but devoid of the refinements
of life and not over-clean.
It is a community of ignorant peasants, un-
able even to write their names, we are told
elsewhere. Brought as emigrants from the
mother-country, they have settled here and
industriously worked the soil and reclaimed
part of the marsh that still spreads before
their doors.
Being ignorant and Industrious, these people
had neither ability nor time to make a study
of the art of diplomacy ; being superstitious,
they fell an easy prey to those who were
skilled in that noble art. They loved their
homes and were content, and very likely, had
they been left to themselves, would not have
84
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The Acadians
known whether England or France owned
Acadia, or might even have supposed they
owned it themselves.
Not being left to themselves, however, they
were instructed on the one hand to take the
oath of allegiance to England, which in all
probability they would have done quite will-
ingly, only that, on the other hand, their
priests told them not to. Very naturally, they
obeyed their priests. What was the command
of a distant and unseen power to them, com-
pared to the actual words and personal pres-
ence of their spiritual advisers ?
Their spiritual advisers should have known
better than to involve this innocent and igno-
rant peasantry in so absurdly unequal a con-
test as a war with the English Government.
But pawns were needed in the great Game
of Governments, and the Acadians made very
good ones.
The chief figure of these unfortunate times
is the unenviable one of Louis Joseph Le
Loutre, vicar-general of Acadia and mission-
ary to the Micmac Indians. He flourished in
the middle of the eighteenth century and was
to an extent the cause of the expulsion of the
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Acadians. Taking advantage of the ignorance
and superstition of the people, we are told he
taught them that allegiance to Louis of France
was inseparable from fidelity to God, and that
to swear allegiance to the Crown of England
was to bring them eternal damnation.
The word of the priest was the only law to
the simple peasantry, and they refused the
oath. When they did take it, they were in-
structed that it was no sin to break it.
The treaty of Utrecht was signed in 17 13,
and the expulsion of the Acadians did not
take place until 1755, so for nearly half a
century England bore with what she looked
upon as treasonable conduct with a forbear-
ance unparalleled in history.
During this long period of time, this forty-
two years, the Acadians, notwithstanding their
unfriendly behaviour, were not taxed, they were
allowed the practice of their own religion and
the ministration of their own priests.
We are informed that from the beginning
the priests were the secret enemies of England,
and when Le Loutre's power began the Aca-
dians were incited to every sort of violence.
They were not asked by England to take
86
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T'he Acadi ans
up arms against their countrymen nor against
the Indians, who were the friends of the
French, but they were enjoined to remain
neutral. They persisted in refusing to take
the oath of allegiance excepting with such
modifications as made it meaningless. More
than this, in time of war they withheld sup-
plies from the English, refusing to sell except
at exorbitant prices, and secretly sent their
stores to their own countrymen.
Le Loutre, when he came upon the scene,
stirred up the Micmacs to constant raids upon
the English, whom they mercilessly killed;
and the more reckless among the Acadians,
disguising themselves as Indians, are said to
have joined the raiders.
Within what she considered her own terri-
tory, England was nourishing an enemy that
threatened at any favourable moment to de-
stroy her.
This state of affairs could not go on for ever.
Matters were nearing a climax ; New England
demanded the suppression of the Acadians,
declaring her o'vn safety depended upon it;
and England would not turn a deaf ear to
New England's cries, though there are those
87
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who claim that her forbearance with the Aca-
dians was not wholly philanthropic. Her
American child was none too submissive ;
and she may well have feared that if the dis-
tractions of war were removed, the too-fast-
growing infant might undertake to break away
from its mother's apron-strings.
So it is a New England man whom we see
coming to execute sentence upon the Aca-
dians. The weighers of events tell us that mat-
ters grew worse and v/orse, that the Acadians
became more and more insolent and insubor-
dinate under the guidance of their priests and
actuated by belief in the final triumph of the
French.
Finally the Acadians were sternly com-
manded to take the oath of allegiance without
alteration, as other British subjects took it, and
they refused. They were given time to con-
sider, but the power to consider did not lie
with them. Le Loutre considered for them,
and threatened to turn his Indians upon them
if they complied. They knew this would be
no vain threat, for his cruel hand had already
been felt in different parts of the country.
Moreover, to comply was to lose their souls.
88
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The jicadians
So they refused, trusting, no doubt, to Eng-
land's past clemency to overlook their conduct
once more.
But this was not to be. Hard pressed by
the French in different directions and doubt-
less fearful of losing Acadia, — and all that
that implied, — England determined finally to
rid herself very effectually of the troublesome
peasants.
It was John Winslow, a descendant of the
early governors of Plymouth Colony, who
sailed from Boston one day with a shipful of
New England volunteers to undertake the
reduction of the unruly Acadians. The Aca-
dians themselves had no suspicion of what was
pending. They were the victims alike of
friend and foe, for two thousand of them had
already been cajoled or driven from their homes
across the frontier to Ficnch lands, and this
had not been done by the English, but by
their own countrymen, the French, who wanted
their services. Thus removed from their Aca-
dian homes, all domestic ties broken, they were
far more willing openly to fight the English.
Winslow helped to reduce the French fort
at the head of the Cumberland Basin, which
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commanded the entrance by land into the
Peninsula of Nova Scotia, and was then com-
missioned to remove those Acadians whose
headquarters were at Grand Pre. Other offi-
cers were sent to perform a similar duty in other
Acadian centres, but it is of Grand Pre, where
the plan was most fully carried out, that we
always hear. It is believed that three thou-
sand or more French settlers were removed
from Acadia, and that over two thousand were
taken from Grand Pre and vicinity.
It was a thankless task to Winslow, and to
his credit be it said he did it reluctantly and as
humanely as possible. It was decided that
the people could not be turned adrift on the
borders of Acadia to join the enemy, who would
be only too glad to receive and make use of
them, and so they were put on board ships and
sent away, scattered all along the English colo-
nies on the Atlantic coast, some of them even
finding their way to Louisiana, where their
descendants may be found to-day, in better
condition if report be true, than were their
ancestors in the apple lands of Acadia.
The same military reason which caused their
dispersal over distant shores also caused their
90
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The Acadia?is
homes to be burned, so that the stragglers, for
many escaped, might not return.
Pains were taken, the historian is careful to
say, not to separate families or neighbours, and
few such events are believed to have occurred.
Yet, whatever precautions were taken, the exile
was pitiful enough, and even the grave histo-
rian cannot refrain from expressing the universal
sentiment as he nears the tragic moment. He
tells us how Winslow sailed down Chignecto
Channel to the Bay of Fundy.
" Borne on the rushing flood, they soon drifted
through the inlet, glided under the rival promontory
of Cape Blomidon, passed the red sandstone cliffs of
Lyon's Cove, and descried the mouth of the rivers
Canard and Des Habitants, where fertile marshes,
diked against the tide, sustained a numerous and
thriving population. Before them spread the bound-
less meadows of Grand Pre, waving with harvests or
alive with grazing catde ; the green slopes behind
were dotted with the simple dwellings of the Acadian
farmers, and the spire of the village church rose
against a background of woody hills. It was a
peaceful rural scene, soon to become one of the
most wretched spots on earth. Winslow did not
land for the present, but held his course tc the
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estuary of the river Pisicjuid, since called the Avon.
Here, where the town of Windsor now stands, there
was a stockade called Fort Edward, where a garrison
of regulars under Captain Alexander Murray kept
watch over the surrounding settlements. The New
England men pitched their tents on the shore, while
the sloops that had brought them slept on the soft
bed of tawny mud left by the fallen tide."
Soon after this Winslow and his men landed
at Grand Pre and were stationed In the village
church, from which the historian Is careful to
Inform us, he had the elders remove the sacred
things, to prevent their being defiled by
heretics.
Winslow, using the church as a storehouse
and place of arms, took his own station In the
priests* house until all should be ready. The
people did not know why he was there, though
his presence could not have been reassuring.
On Friday, the fifth of September, 1755, at
three o'clock In the afternoon, the little church,
in obedience to orders, was filled with the men
and boys of Grand Pre, — an expectant and
anxious throng waiting to hear the will of their
superiors.
The decree was read ; the blow had fallen.
92
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The Acadians
by
Once again we see the crowd assembled on
the shore. The men are shut in the church ;
the women carry the household goods to the
ships. It is not the assembly we saw a while
ago, however, in poetry and imagination, but a
crowd of poor hunted peasants, the victims of
their own ignorance and the playthings of greed
and cruelty. Their own people have betrayed
them, and the foreign nation which has so long
tolerated them on the lands they themselves
have snatched from the sea and cultivated now
casts them forth.
The flames leap up from the miserable
thatched hovels they call their homes, and the
cry of despair breaks forth, for, poor though
they are, those hovels are their homes ; they
love them and they love the fields they have
tilled. They are cast miserably forth, outcasts
indeed, and no matter how poor in intellect or
in spirit they may have been, their cry resounds
through time. It is their great sorrow, their
tragic fate, which appeals to every heart and
makes the expulsion of the Acadians as it really
occurred but a shade less pathetic than the
tragedy the poet recited.
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VIII
BLOMIDON
KINGSPORT lies on the edge of a
bluff below which the mighty tides
surge in and out. It is a little
wind-blown village unadorned by
fish-flakes, for fishing is not carried on in
Minas Basin. Its wharf is less imposing than
that at Digby, though the tides here rise to a
height of over fifty feet ; but the shore is
shelving, and when the tide is out the red
sands are bare about the wharf, and the vessels
lie aground.
The Annapolis Basin is a serene expanse of
water where one, as it were, feels the lift of the
tides, while Minas Basin is a maelstrom where
one feels their rush.
Once Kingsport carried on an important
ship-building industry, but her ship-yards are
now no more. From her pier, however, ves-
sels sail for London bearing the apples and
potatoes of the interior.
From Kingsport one gets a clear view of the
peculiar outline of Blomidon. A vertical wall
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of dark gray basaltic trap drops some two or
three hundred feet from the top, from which
the fir-trees look over. Below the trap is a
wide sloping terrace of lighter gray amygdaloid,
and below that the steep slope to the sea is
of dark red sandstone, the same sandstone of
which the cliffs along the shore are formed,
and of which the rich red mud that makes
the Cornwallis dike-lands so famous is largely
composed.
Blomidon's stern aspect is chiefly due to the
vertical wall of rock that caps it, and the impres-
sion it creates is not lessened when one thinks of
the stupendous catastrophe that placed it there.
The North Mountain ridge extends from
Blomidon to Digby Gut, and from Digby Gut
southward to Brier Island, where it ends. The
underlying sandstone of the ridge was no doubt
formed by the action of water at the level of
the sea, and was at a later period elevated.
But the bed of trap that covers the sandstone
the whole length of the ridge was once a vast
river of molten rock, poured out from some
great volcanic crater, — or more probably series
of craters.
Just where these outlets were, no one knows;
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but somewhere along the extent of North
Mountain the great mouths yawned, to be
finally choked full and concealed by succeed-
ing geological phenomena.
Then came the Ice Age, when Nova Scotia
with her mountains was buried deep under a
frozen mantle, and when the irresistible, slow-
moving glaciers emulated the power of fire and
tore away the softer rock, scooping out the
Cornwallis and Annapolis valleys, and carrying
boulders and pebbles of trap across from
North Mountain, to deposit them at the foot
of South Mountain's slaty mass.
Thus fire and ice have wrought in ages past
with tremendous power; but a gentler and
equally potent spirit has been at work for cen-
turies, filling the heart of the mountain with
exquisite crystals.
When the volcanic fires first burst forth,
they scattered cinders and particles of old lava,
which formed a deep layer of more porous
material, before the final pouring forth of the
main stream of molten rock. This layer is
the amygdaloid belt, which, being cf lighter
colour, one can plainly see crossing Blomidon's
great front.
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As time passed and the trap above assumed
its present hard state, the porous belt below
was permeated by the rain-water that insinuated
itself into all the crevices, slowly, as the centu-
ries passed, dissolving the silica and its com-
pounds from the rock traversed, and depositing
them in the cavities of the amygdaloid layer.
Here these materials arranged themselves into
crystals, those mysterious and lovely blossoms
in the hearts of rocks, and filled the hollows,
large and small, with the most delicate and
exquisitely beautiful forms.
North Mountain is an exhaustless treasure-
house, before whose marvels even Sindbad's
wondrous cave grows poor. Within it exquis-
itely beautiful forms lie waiting to flash or glow
whenever the rays of the sun shall penetrate the
blackness of their prison cells. Here lie blue
amethysts, agates of winsome colours, and dark
red jasper, besides many another gem of lovely
hue. Nor are these treasures held fast in the
heart of the mountain inaccessible to man.
In some places the hard trap has overflowed
the whole side of the mountain and piled up in
a solid mass, in others it is less impregnable.
Often where the cliff rises sheer, as at Blomi-
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don and at points along North Mountain
facing the Bay of Fundy, the tricksy frost
gnomes have been at work loosening and split-
ting away fragments of rock and even separat-
ing large masses which the rain washes down
the mountain side, or which fall in the form of
land-slides, sometimes of considerable extent.
These displaced masses are chiefly composed
of the more friable amygdaloid. Down comes
the shattered cliflf, in its fall exposing its cav-
erns of flashing crystals, while geodes and
nodules of various sizes roll over the sands at
the foot of the mountain, all to be finally
washed away by the hungry tides, and those
of Blomidon ground against the hard rock that
forms the bottom of the sea basin, until in
course of time the lovely crystals no doubt
help to form the mud that makes the dike-
lands fertile, and the Cornwallis farmers raise
their hay and oats from jewels.
But not all of Blomidon's jewels meet this
fate. At low tide the sands at the foot of the
headland are bare, and then come the treasure-
hunters from Kingsport and Canning and all
the neighbouring towns, and eagerly employ
the time the tide allows them in gathering what
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their hands can find ; very beautiful as well as
rare crystals often reward their search.
There is one place particularly rich in the
mineral deposits that fall from above, and its
name, Amethyst Cove, sufficiently explains
what is most eagerly sought for there. The
best time to hunt for Blomidon's treasures is
in the early summer, after the frosts of winter
and the rains of spring have loosened and
washed down the rocks above, and before the
summer tourist has appeared in force to deplete
the store, although at any time of year when
the beach is accessible the seeker need not go
away empty-handed.
Perhaps no part of Blomidon's treasures has
so great a fascination as the geodes. What
fresher delight is given to mortals than to break
a geode, a rough rounded stone, often with no
beauty of form or colour, and discover within
a central cavity lined with glowing crystals or
entirely filled with clustering jewels !
No wonder Blomidon is said to have been
the abode of Glooscap, the Hiawatha of the
Micmac Indians, whose wigwams once stood on
these shores and who peopled forest and head-
land with supcnatural beings of their own
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creation, chief among whom was the mighty
Glooscap, friend of man.
There is a legend telHng of a mystic stone
which at night is sometimes seen blazing on
the brow of the mountain. This is the " eye
of Glooscap " or the " diamond of Cape
Blomidon."
Although Blomidon is willing that mortals
should see this jewel of" miraculous radiance "
and even allow its whereabouts to be discovered
at times, woe to the unlucky finder who should
presume to remove it. Terrible misfortune
would be his portion, and in the end the gem,
by its own miraculous powers, would find its
way back to Blomidon's brow.
There is another story to the effect that
among the crown jewels of France has blazed
for over a century a great amethyst from the
treasure-house of Blomidon ; and it has been
suggested that the unstable fortunes of France
may be due to her possession of this very
eye of Glooscap. Certain it is this token
has not of late been observed on Blomidon's
front.
Although one can see Blomidon clearly out-
lined from Kingsport one must get close to
100
Blomidon
examine it, and this can be done at any time
by crossing the Bay to Parrsboro. The boat
from Kingsport to Parrsboro leaves and lands
by the grace of Neptune. It alternately lies
Oil the sand some thirty feet or more below the
top (jf the pier, and rides triumphantly with
its djclc on a level with that structure.
One fair afternoon we sat aloft and waited
for the boat to ascend to us.
The captain cheerily announced that we
could get aboard in a few minutes. It certainly
did not look so as we gazed down upon the far
away " Evangeline," but the captain's faith in
Fundy was not unrequited, and soon the smoke-
stack began to appear above the edge of the
wharf.
Soon after we were able to reach the top of
the cabin which formed the " Evangeline's "
only deck. Our descent was certainly a little
steep, but not so much so as that of a four-
footed fellow-passenger.
A derrick stood on the " Evangeline's " bow
and was used in lowering baggage and other
bulky articles when the captain wanted to get
under way before the full of the tide.
This day a man wished to cross with his
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horse, — an undertaking in which the horse did
not appear to sympathise.
A narrow bridge with a railing on either side
was run out from the pier, one end resting on
the pier itself, the other suspended in mid-air
by ropes attached to th'i useful derrick. Upon
this unstable structure the horse was finally
persuaded to place hims!;lf, his master standing
on the bridge at his head, a position which no
one envied him. The derrick of a sudden
began to lower away, to the astonishment and
consternation of the horse, who, whatever he
may have suspected, certainly could not have
looked for any such perfidy as this. He made
a desperate effort to back off once and for all,
but it was too late. His front feet rapidly
descended while his hind ones remained aloft,
until he stood at an angle which no horse could
be expected to maintain, when down he slid,
dragging his master with him, both landing in
a heap in the bottom of the boat. Fortunately
neither was hurt, and no harm done except
to the feelings and heels of the horse, the latter
being skinned and the former damaged to the
extent of making him desire to jump over-
board as soon as he found himself fairly on
102
Blomidon
his abused legs. But he was dissuaded from
so rash a measure, and his wounds comforted
with tar.
We learned that this was the usual method
of putting horses aboard the " Evangeline."
We left Kingsport and followed the land
toward Blomidon ; as we neared the headland
the boat went closer to shore. A loon off the
port side eyed us anxiously and finally with an
unearthly wail disappeared under the water.
" Poor thing ! " said M., " it is crying for
Glooscap;" and if the Indian legend is true, no
doubt it was, for according to that the loons were
Glooscap's huntsmen, and he had taught them
their strange cry, promising that whenever he
heard it he would come to their succour. When
he left the world of men the loons were discon-
solate, and now they go wandering up and down
the earth calling for Glooscap. Glooscap seems
to have spent much of his time in the neigh-
bourhood of Minas Basin and there to have
performed his most remarkable feats.
The legendary accounts of the formation of
the Cornwallis Valley may not be quite as true
as the geological story, but they are at least as
entertaining. According to them, Minas Basin
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was once a great lake with a wall of rock ex-
tending across the end from Blomidon to Par-
tridge Island. It was the home of the beavers,
and the Great Beaver threatened to flood the
country with his monster dam. The people
appealed to Glooscap, and he and the beaver
had a conflict, in which Glooscap won, and
swinging the end of the dam about made an
outlet for the waters of Minas, the same out-
let through which the tides surge in and out
to-day. Up to that time the Cornwallis Val-
ley was a part of the lake and was connected
with another lake that occupied what is now
the Annapolis Valley ; but after the opening of
the dam at Blomidon and the gap at Digby
Gut, bjth of which Glooscap achieved, the
water drained away and left the valleys as we
find them to-day.
"If you do not believe it, you will when we
pass Blomidon," M. assured me, " for then you
can see the dam."
As we neared Blomidon, its great wall be-
came more and more impressive. The iron
front of basalt frowned aloft, a stupendous cliff,
resting on the rock below in fine turrets. Be-
neath it we saw in detail the terrace of amyg-
104
Blomidon
duloid, fragments from it strewing the sand-
stone beneath, in places quite concealing it,
and forming streams down the gullies where
the young trees grew. These fragments we
knew were scattered full of crystal treasures of
great beauty and no small value, jewels for the
roots of the young trees to twine about.
According to the Micmac legends these
jewels were placed on the mountain by Gloos-
cap. It seems that the great chief had an old
woman for a housekeeper and a beautiful boy
for a page. He never married, but devoted his
life to the service of man, teaching him the arts
of hunting and fishing and curing the game. He
also taught him the names of the stars and the
constellations and what little he needed to know
of agriculture. But there were times when the
Great Spirit's magnanimity extended to his old
housekeeper and then he caused her to assume
the beautiful form of youth, and lavished pre-
cious jewels upon her. It was during such a
time that he sprinkled the whole mountain in
his prodigal generosity.
From our near view we saw the red sand-
stone of Blomidon to be crossed at times by
seams of lighter rock and blotched and spotted
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with riull green. Although Blomidon as seen
in profile from the Cornwallis Valley appears
to be a narrow bluff, its real form is apparent
when one passes along its front, which is not
narrow but forms a long wall of rock broken
at intervals. The headland grew more inter-
esting and more majestic as we went on, so
that for a time we almost forgot the water
surging about us. But this was not for long;
we were nearing the opening to the great
trough, where the water rushes through with
a velocity of six or seven miles an hour.
This trough is about four miles wide from
Blomidon to Partridge Island, and is about
eight miles long, opening at the lower end into
Minas Channel, which is itself a mighty trough
leading into the Bay of Fundy.
The Atlantic tides enter Fundy at its broad
end, which lies so as to receive them without
diminution of tlxeir force ; but Fundy narrows
like a funnel, and the pent up waters, continu-
ing with the impetus with which they entered,
not able to spread out, pile up.
At Minas Channel the same thing is repeated
on a smaller scale. The already abnormally
high tide, rushing through the channel, finds
1 06
Blomidon
ids
only the narrow outlet into Minas Basin,
through which it propels itself with terrific
force.
When wind and tide are in conflict, the strife
is terrible and no boat can venture into the
maelstrom. Even on a calm day the water
can readily be seen pouring through on the
flow of the tide, like a strong, swift river, the
current being distinguishable for some dis-
tance in the calmer waters of the Basin. It
rushes along in eddies and whirlpools and
white-capped waves, which give one a vivid
realisation of what it is capable of under
provocation of the wind.
Blomidon's stern front defies the storm-
winds and holds them back from the fertile
valley, but glancing from the rock they strike
the water, causing terrible commotion.
Even when the day is calm the " Evangeline "
cannot keep her head steadily to her destina-
tion as she crosses the channel, for an incoming
swirl of water will often strike her and turn her
several points from her course.
The sea bottom at the foot of Blomidon is
smooth and solid rock, where no boat can
anchor, so when a storm is imminent the
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boats flee through the dangerous channel to
the safe waters of West Bay.
As soon as we were fairly past Bloinidon, we
could look down the inlet to Cape Splits which
forms the farther edge of the trough on the
south side, while Cape Sharp is seen extending
into the water from the opposite shore.
Cape Split is a curious-looking object. At
its extreme point a great cliff of solid rock
seems to have been cleft or split from the
mainland by a blow from some mighty sword.
It stands alone, towering aloft, the home of
countless sea-birds that build their nests upon
its unscaleable summit. Their white forms can
always be seen in clouds about it.
While Blomidon's front extends almost due
north and south, only the southeastern corner
being visible from the Cornwallis Valley, the
ridge of rock which terminates in Cape Split
lies nearly at right angles to it, extending east
and west.
This ridge is a narrow spit of solid rock ; and
a glance at the map will show how, if it were
swung about until Cape Split touched the
Cumberland shore, Minas Basin would in-^eed
be a lake.
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Of this M. reminded me as soon as we came
in sight of the queer-looking cape, and it could
no longer be doubted that if Glooscap was able
to swing this dam of rock hi had really done
so.
M. said it was no harder to believe he swung
it than to believe he sailed on Minas' troubled
waters in a stone canoe, which, according to the
Indian legend, was his usual method of pro-
gression excepting when he preferred to ride a
whale. These feats indeed are no more re-
markable than that performed by Saint Patrick,
who, as every one knows, is said to have floated
ashore on an iron door when shipwrecked off
the east coast of Ireland.
In front of us as we crossed the channel was
the bold front of Partridge Island, while down
the channel, on the same side of the coast,
stood out the rocky headland of Cape Sharp.
To the right of Partridge Island, and some
distance away, were the picturesque forms of
the Five Islands, for whose existence Glooscap
was also credited by the Indians as being re-
sponsible, he having thrown them at the Great
Beaver at the time of the conflict.
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IX
PARTRIDGE ISLAND
PARRSBORO is not on the shore of
the bay, but lies a mile or more up
the Parrsboro River. The " Evan-
geline " goes there if the tide is high,
otherwise she lands at a pier on the Minas
shore near Partridge Island.
Parrsboro is not attractive. The best thing
about it is its tidal river with tall piers backing
up against the village.
Partridge Island — as all that portion on the
shore near the pier is called — is far more in-
teresting. The pier there is a variation of the
one at Digby. It is smaller, though perhaps
more picturesque, being short and very high,
and its black, dripping sides, heavily draped
with seaweeds, contain openings into the lower
landing which look like caves. It is heavily
buttressed on the side away from the incom-
ing tide, by a structure filled in with large
stones. This was necessary in order to keep
it from being pushed bodily away by the
spring tides.
no
Partridge Island
The pier was built several times before it
could be made to stay there. It waa Sir
Charles Tupper who persevered, and when
worsted by wind and water tried again and
again until he got it anchored firm and fast.
It cost a great deal of money, and in memory
of Sir Charles's many defeats, the pier up to
the present day is called Tupper's Snag, though
it would seem only fair now to re-christen it
Tupper's Triumph.
It was a disappointment to learn that the
pier at Partridge Island was only thirty-five
feet high. We had come there for the purpose
of being amazed at the sight of a sixty-feet tide,
but how could this happen in the presence of
a pier with a paltry height of thirty-five feet ?
We had heard wonderful accounts of the
performances of Fundy's tides, but wherever
we went the highest tides, the rips and bores,
those wonderful cross-currents and wave-like
rushings in of the water, were somewhere else.
We went to Partridge Island, fondly hoping
for the tides we had been promised, only to
find a thirty-five-feet pier !
Still, we could not complain of the scale
upon which the tides were planned there ; and
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had it not been for that pier we should have
believed the tide was coming in sixty feet high
before our eyes.
The harbour-master made a helpless gesture
wlicn we put some questions to him. Said he,
" Don't ask me about the tides of Fundy. I
don't know anything about them. Nobody
docs. When, nor how, nor why. I know only
this, that in summer the high tides come on
the full moon, while the winter high tides are
on the new moon. But I don't know why."
In fact, nobody seemed to know anything
about the matter. The tide-table in the al-
manac did not coincide with the " Evangeline's "
schedule for leaving one pier or the other, or
for starting at one time or another. " When
does the boat start to-morrow ? " is the ques-
tion the traveller must ask when planning to
depart from Partridge Island. Happy is he
if he finds the hour not unseemly and not out
of all proximity to the starting time of the
Kingsport train. Having found out the
" Evangeline's " intentions, he will do well to
take his station at the wharf a good half-hour
earlier than advertised, for the boat frequently
leaves ahead of time.
112
Partridge Island
From the queer-looking pier on the shore
with its theatrical setting of promontories and
great sea basin one looks across at Partridge
Island, which is not an island, but is connected
by a broad curved beach with the mainland.
It is a rocky headland rising straight out of the
sea, its iron cliff? holding to their channel the
wild tides that rush through between it and
Blomidon.
Beyond it across the water we saw Blomidon,
Its stern aspect softened by the distance and
the sea-fogs, and beyond Blomidon stood out
the distant form of Split. Through the opening
between Partridge Island and the mainland we
got a charming view of Cape Sharp, which is by
no tneans as forbidding as its name, while away
down the channel below Sharp lay Cape d'Or,
though why its golden name we did not dis-
cover.
A tall-masted ship was anchored off the
point of Cape Sharp when we first saw it from
Partridge Island, giving just the needed touch
to the composition of the picture.
West Bay, which lay between us and Sharp,
is the harbour sought by the boats of Minas
when foul weather is expected. It is also the
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anchoring ground for the large vessels that
carry coal and wood from the back country,
for Parrsboro is the outlet for the Springhill
coal which comes to it from the mines by rail.
Standing near the centre of the amphitheatre
made by the cur\'ing beach that connects Par-
tridge Island with the mainland, and looking
down into the sea basin at low water, one gets
perhaps the most vivid realisation of the great
Fundy tides.
It is like looking down the slanting sides of
a colossal reservoir; and the beach instead of
sand is composed of large pebbles, quite in
keeping with the scale upon which this mighty
bowl is formed. The water kisses the upper
rim and then swiftly falls, leaving bare the
sides of the bowl and for a long distance the
bottom as well. Then back it comes, rushing
up in small, curling breakers, up, up, until it
threatens to overflow the land. But this it
never does ; try as it will, it can but fill the
bowl and then sink back as though exhausted
with the effort.
By perseverance we finally found our high
tide and found it before our eyes at Partridge
Island. We had watched it come and go several
114
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Partridge Island
days with tempered emotion, for we could not
forget the thirty-five-feet pier, which, to our
ignorance, betokened a thirty-five-feet tide.
Then we began to consider and also some-
body told us, and we fell to, and wept in vexa--
tion that we had looked upon and had not
been amazed at the wonder we were seeking.
We did not see the tide rise sixty feet, but
we did see it reach the creditable height of
fifty feet or over, a very giant of a tide when
we understood. The sloping sea bottom,
which is bare some distance out at low tide,
is bare for a hundred feet at the lowest tides,
and at the highest spring-tides the obnoxious
thirty-five-feet pier is swallowed completely —
as it deserves to be.
We were told that the highest of Fundy's
tides, those that rise seventy feet in the geog-
raphies and geologies, must be sought in
Cumberland Basin. But we did not seek
them there. We had come to Parrsboro for
them, and, lo ! they were in Cumberland Basin.
If we pursued them to Cumberland Basin,
they no doubt would flee away to some yet
more distant spot, and we did not wish to put
them to the trouble.
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We had the same difficulty with the bores
and rips; wherever we went they were some-
where else. So we never once saw the tide
coming in, in a solid wall five feet high,
though our faith that it does so is still un-
shaken. We were told that at the right time
of year — of course this was the wrong time —
we could see a very creditable display of tidal
fury at the foot of Partridge Island. But
though we did not see the most pronounced
of Fundy's phenomena, we had the best and
grandest always with us, the swift filling and
emptying of the mighty sea basins, the wet
and dripping sides of the tall piers close-
grown with seaweed, and the shining red
chasms of the tidal rivers.
Partridge Island has the same formation as
Blomidon, though it is less than half as high.
From the sea on the east rises a turreted cliff
of basalt, the lower part of which is amygda-
loid ; while on the western side the basalt
forms only a thin covering to the cliff of
amygdaloid. Underneath the whole can here
and there be seen cropping out the under-
lying red sandstone.
So Partridge Island has, too, its belt of
X16
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Partridge Island
jewels, a broader belt in proportion to its
size than even Blomidon wears, and its treas-
ures are much more accessible, being indeed
within easy reach of the hammer of the col-
lector at low tide.
Amethyst, agate, chalcedony, carnelian, jasper,
and opal belong to Partridge Island, and it has
besides crystals all its own, while of those it
shares with Blomidon and the rocks back of
Digby, some are here found in their finest forms.
Partridge Island stands alone, a turret of
crystals on a foreign shore, for the rock com-
posing the coast back of it belongs to the
lower carboniferous sandstones and shales.
The great bed of trap which was expelled
when Blomidon and all North Mountain
received their gifts of jewelled belt and iron
crown ends in isolated bluffs along this car-
boniferous coast. What has become of the
intervening portion, that lay where Minas
Basin now gives hospitable entertainment to
the fleeing tides of Fundy ?
Partridge Island was one of Glooscap's re-
sorts, — he crossing to it in his great stone
canoe, though when he had long distances to
go he called up a whale.
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Glooscap's whales appear to have been de-
ficient in power to see the land as they neared
it, and depended upon their august ric' *o tell
them in time to prevent bumping th . noses
against the shore. But this Glooscap never
did. Wishing to land dry-shod, he urged the
poor whale to its utmost speed, when it landed
itself high and dry, greatly to its chagrin. But
Glooscap was not ungrateful, and putting the
end of his bow against the whale, with a slight
motion of his arm he slid it back into the
water. His whales had a great fondness for
smoking and sometimes asked Gloos' n for a
pipe at parting. This he willingly olied,
when the whale went its way, smoking, to sea,
Glooscap is said to have had a famous revel
on Partridge Island which the Micmacs speak
of with awe to this day. It was upon the
occasion of a visit from a young magician bear-
ing the name KitpooseSgiinow. Glooscap in-
vited the guest of the distinguished name to go
fishing with him by torchlight, and got in readi-
ness his monster canoe built of granite rock and
supplied with paddles and spear of stone. Ac-
cording to the legend, the youth caught up the
boat as though it had been a birch-bark canoe
ii8
Partridge Island
and tossed it into the water. The game they
caught was a large whale, which the youth
landed as though it were a herring. They
carried their booty back to Partridge Island,
whence they had embarked, and finished the
night by cooking and eating the whole whale.
Glooscap's power over cold and heat reminds
us of the season legends of other peoples. He
had contests with his rivals in which each tried
to overcome the other with cold. When it
was Glooscap's turn to resist he built a mighty
fire of whale oil, but toward morning invariably
succumbed and allowed his friends to be frozen,
but never forgot to restore them when the
contest was ov^ ". Then he took his turn at
congealing his op^^onent's train and succeeded
in time, though the opponent was possessed of
the same power to restore his frozen followers.
Glooscap finally disappeared at the encroach-
ments of the white man, driven away by the
wickedness of the people. When he was with
them all the animals lived in accord and under-
stood one another, but at his departure there
was a confusion of tongues, and the wolf could
no longer understand the words of the bear,
nor any animal the speech of another species.
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The great snowy owls went deep into the
forests, to return no more until the coming of
Glooscap. They may at time's be heard cry-
ing, " Koo Koo Skoos ! Koo Koo Skoos ! " —
Oh, I ^;n sorry ! Oh, I am sorry !
The children are always pleased to know
that Gloo'.cap had two little dogs no larger
than mice which he carried in his pocket, or
up his sleeve, but which could suddenly in-
crease to the size and form of the largest and
swiitest and fiercest of their kind when he
needed their services. He had a way of turn-
ing things into stone, and by looking down
the channel toward Cape d'Or, one can see
Spencer's Island, which is not an island at all,
but merely Glooscap's kettle turned upside
down. He put it there after using it, to wait
for his return, and there it remains to this day.
\{ one passing that way notices large boulders
or rocks sticking out of the water, they are the
scraps left after he had tried out his oil.
Down that way somewhere, too, he once
turned into stone a moose that tried to escape
by swimming ; and the two dogs that were
phasing it still sit on the shore with their
cars pricked forward watching it, — both solid
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P artridge Island
rock. Many, many other marvels did the
mighty Glooscap, friend of man, perform.
The Indians are gone. They are no longer
to be seen as of old on Minas' shore. They
are almost as mythical at Parrsboro as is
Glooscap himself; only their legends still
linger about the rocks and coast they loved
in days gone by.
Once upon a dme, and not so very long
ago, Parrsboro was an important boat-building
centre. At that time the town, what there
was of it, was down by the shore where the
Parrsboro House now stands.
The pine-trees are gone, and Parrsboro's ship-
yards have lost their prestige. Lumber still
comes from the back country, and, such as it
is, makes the wealth of the region, in conjunc-
tion with that other timber which has been
preserved in the depths of the earth and altered
to form the valuable coal-beds of Springhill
and neighbouring localities.
" When the town was on the shore," was
the halcyon period of Parrsboro.
There is a hill a little back from the shore,
and between this and the beach the old town
stood. The terrace above the deep sea bowl
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was aglow with flowers of such brightness and
profusion that they are still remembered.
We should have liked to see the village in
its flower-garden age. In its nook back of the
great sea basin, with its setting of impressive
bluflTs that make Minas at this point so splen-
didly picturesque, and with ample flower-gar-
dens brightening the stern coast, it must have
been well worth a visit.
In spite of the pebbly shore whose stones
roll under the feet, the visitor will not be long
in finding his way across to Partridge Island,
which is as delightful as a mountain of crys-
tals ought to be. On the land side it is thickly
wooded with rather small " hard wood " trees,
as the people here call all but the conifers ; and
we wandered along a grassy winding path,
quite away from the outer world, into a wild-
wood seclusion.
Presently we came to firs and spruces cov-
ered with sage-green moss, and then to a
hollow where the trees were dead, standing in
close ranks with gray, interlaced limbs, heavily
mantled with sage-green moss that hung like
beards from the lower branches. It was a fit
dwelling-place for the gnomes, its deep recesses
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Partridge Island
dark at midday, and we felt that lost spirits
might be wandering there in the twilight.
Beyond it the living trees were scarcely less
mossy; and we were met by a small red
squirrel that said not a word but stared at us
in a silent and un-squirrel-like manner, and
fled wildly into the depths of the forest, as
though death were at his heels.
The squirrels here were a strange breed :
whether the spell of the dead forest was over
them I cannot say, but they were a speechless
race, peering out from behind a tree-trunk and
then dashing away without challenge or word
of welcome. Perhaps they were Glooscap's
squirrels, and held us responsible for driving
him away.
As we went on, the trees grew larger and
more apart, and finally we had the surprise and
delight of coming suddenly to the edge of the
cliff that stands upon the bay side. It took
steady nerves to stand on the brink and look
down the stern wall of rock to the tides below.
The cliff was broken and terraced on one side,
and the incoming tide was impatiently raging
against its hard front. It was an awesome
sight, and we there got nearest to the tides
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where they thunder against the walls of rock
that hold them unrelentingly to their channel.
From the top of the cliff we got a fine view
down the channel, — of West Bay with its
rocky sentinel of Cape Sharp in the fore-
ground ; of Cape Split in the distance with its
isolated peak encircled by the white-winged
birds that continually fly about it ; and far away
the distant headland of Cape d'Or, with Spen-
cer's Island to remind us of Glooscap. Here
and there on the water we saw sudden flashes
of light that we could not account for, until we
remembered the peeps we had seen on another
part of Minas* shore, and then we knew the
little silver-breasted birds were here also per-
forming their marvellous evolutions.
The headlands of this strange shore have all
a peculiar interest. Blomidon and Partridge
Island have the romance of their jewels. Cape
Sharp and the distant Cape d'Or share with
them in this, f^r they, too, like Partridge
Island, stand in their majesty of red sandstone
and crystal-bearing trap, on the edge of the
carboniferous coast. They have the same
formation as Blomidon, and yield their treas-
ures to the seeker.
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Partridge Island
The Five Islands are also portions of the
same volcanic formation, and have their crystals.
But Split has no jewels. The trap here
overflowed and piled up so that the strange-
looking cape is made of the iron-hard trap
only. Devoid of vegetation, devoid of beauty,
Cape Split is yet the chosen home of the soft-
breasted birds that continually caress it.
The most charming place of all at Partridge
Island was the hill back of the Parrsboro
House. Up its sides ranked the ever-present
spruce and fir trees, but the top was open, with
only an occasional stretch of alders or a sym-
metrical young fir.
Uncut grass, now a soft, silvery yellow, the
colour of a sheep's back, rippled as the wind
passed over, while great patches of the bluest
of low-growing blueberries, bright red bunch-
berries, and deep crimson cranberries made a joy-
ous medley of bright colours. There were two
kinds of cranberries there, — one that looked
like those we know so well in our fall markets,
and the small upland berry, deep red and with
a pleasant sub-acid flavour all its own.
Never saw we such prolific blueberries.
They grew close to the earth, wiiich was one
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solid blue expanse wherever they appeared.
In short, never had we seen such a merry,
berry-bedecked hillside. The bunchberries
laughed in scarlet glee all down one side of it,
while the cranberries did their best to outshine
them in extensive patches here and there.
Fair as it was under foot, there was in
addition a splendid view from this breezy,
berry-distracted hill-top.
On one side shimmered the picturesque
channel, with its bird-silvered Split, its Cape
Sharp and the rest, while jewel-belted Blomi-
don and Partridge Island guarded the entrance
to the Basin. On the other side lay the shin-
ing Basin and the Cumberland coast, with the
uprising Five Islands, and nearer the Two
Brothers, small but jewelled islands like the
others, where one goes when in need of extra
beautiful moss agates. Shining in the sunlight
was Silver Crag, which is not jewelled and is
only silver by courtesy of the sun, that causes
its gypsum cliffs thus to shine forth. Far
beyond is Economy Point, the other side of
which Minas Basin grows narrow, and is called
Cobequid Bay.
The hill-top from which we get this most
126
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Partridge Island
in
d is
luses
Far
extended of all views is so pleasant a place one
loves to linger there and to come again and
again. Its outlook is not so dramatic as the
one on the steep cliff of Partridge Island, but
it is more charming. For every-day living
one prefers the merry bunchberries, the blue-
berries, the cranberries, and the grass the
colour of a sheep's back, to the terrifying cliff
with its sombre surroundings of rock and dark-
green fir-trees.
The picturesque new red sandstone elevations
with their overlying trap give to the west end
of Minas Basin its chief attraction, but there is
much to be said for the twisted and contorted
carboniferous beds that predominate in Cum-
berland County. They contain the valuable
coal deposits that crop out at Springhill and
abut upon the shore of Cumberland Basin, and
they are the source whence come the grind-
stones that gladden the farmers' hearts, but not
the backs of their boys, all over the United
States.
At Jogglns on Cumberland Basin the car-
boniferous strata are broken off short, as North
Mountain is on Minas ; and there can be studied,
as almost nowhere else in the world, these
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interesting and ofttimes beautiful formations.
We heard of fossil trees standing upright on
the shore, and of fossils as various and valuable
to the geologist as the gems of Blomidon and
its neighbours are to the collectors of beautiful
stones.
The " back country *' is extremely rocky and
rugged with rolling hills and intervening valleys,
more or less fertile. The woods are exquisitely
mossy and the brooks the most distracting
of their kind, as clear as crystal and as wild as
the rocky land through which they find their
sparkling way. Their pools are not untenanted,
as one can discover by sprinkling crumbled
leaves on the surface when the inquisitive trout
put up their noses and display their colours.
The lumbermen set up their portable saw-
mills back in the woods ; and the " deals," as
they call the unplaned spruce boards, cannot
float down the turbulent and meandering
brooks, nor yet be drawn by waggons or sleds
through the rocky wilderness, so sluices are
built, sometimes many miles in length, which
carry the water of the turbulent brooks in a
steady flow down the hills. Down hills and
across valleys the wooden troughs float the deals,
128
Partridge Island
and we passed under one that spanned the
valley eighty feet above our heads, held up on
a trestle with slender spider-like legs. These
sluices leak freely ; besides, the water washes
over the sides whenever a deal comes along
forming cascades more interesting to observe
than to pass under. The deals sometimes go
overboard, and we saw them strewing the ground
along the course of the high sluice and breathed
a sigh of relief when safely past the spot where
a deal might have dropped down some eighty
feet on our heads.
One day we bade farewell to Parrsboro and
trusted ourselves to the mercy of the " Evange-
line" at break of day. A light fog partly
obscured the surrounding headlands that looked
out at us dim and mysterious.
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HALIFAX
GO to Halifax ! is a command many
have received, but few obeyed. To
most of those thus apostrophised
in early youth "Halifax" had no
concrete existence, but was an undesirable and
unlocatable place, to " go to " when one had
been troublesome.
Not to have gone to Halifax cannot be
regarded as a serious deprivation, for the way
there across the country is not enchanting, nor
is the city itself uncommonly attractive.
But if, being at Grand Pre, one does go to
Halifax and on the way passes Windsor at low
tide, he will be rewarded by beholding the
ruddy bed of the Avon during the temporary
absence of the river, that tidal stream having
taken itself off and left the ships in its channel
to lean ingloriously against the wharves with
their keels in the mud, waiting as best they may
for the unnatural river to come back and restore
them to their wonted dignity. It must be
130
Halifax
humiliating to a ship to lie in a river that goes
out from under it twice a day.
Besides possessing the bed of the inconstant
Avon, Windsor is distinguished as the birth-
place of Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, the
humorist, historian, and man of affairs who was
born in 1796 and became known to fame as
" Sam Slick," the prototype of the conven-
tional Yankee of caricature, of the stage, and
now of popular fancy, who is amusing the world
under the newer name of " Uncle Sam."
Windsor also has the oldest college in Canada,
King's College, which was opened in 1789.
Outside of the town, on Minas Basin and
on the shores of the St. Croix River, white
gypsum crops out in sepulchral-looking cliffs.
It is called " plaster " by the Nova Scotians, and
is mined in large quantities and sent to the
United States, where, having been calcined, it is
sold as plaster of Paris, or merely ground fine
as a fertiliser.
The mineral called terra alba is found north
of Windsor on Cobequid Bay. We did not
see terra alba nor feel special interest in it
until we discovered with what pride its pos-
session was regarded by the people. Then we
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bestirred ourselves and found out that it is a
silicate of aluminium, or, in common speech,
just ordinary pipe clay, which is immorally used
for adulterating candies and paint, but other-
wise for whitening the sails of yachts and
making irresistible the boot-tops, sword-belts,
and scabbards of the brave soldier on parade
day.
After a time one begins to have a feeling
that if he travels long enough in Nova Scotia
he will find out where everything comes from
without recourse to the encyclopsedias. It
brings grindstones, plaster of Paris, and pipe-
clay nearer to one's daily life, as it were, to
behold with the mortal eye the rocks whence
they come. Such things, like apples to the
city-bred child, had always seemed to us to be
the product of barrels and boxes in the back
recesses of the city shops.
Aside from gypsum, there is very little to
interest one between Windsor and Halifax.
The country is stony and overgrown w\^\
stunted evergreens.
As one nears Halifax, Bee ' ap .rs
all the prettier for contrast w the .derness.
It is a long arm of the Atlantic t lat reaches
132
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Halifax
to
ax.
h
up into the land apparently for the purpose of
affording pleasant sites on its hilly shores for the
homes of the more prosperous " Haligonians."
Close to Halifax, where the Basin contracts
into " the narrows," by which it joins the bay,
is a picturesque negro settlement, looking very
much out of place in this cold northern land ;
and we wondered how these children of the
tropics found their way here, until we recalled —
but not with pride — the slavery epoch in our
own history.
Halifax has the site for a splendid city. It
lies on a peninsula clasped in bright arms of
the sea, and from the centre rises a beautiful
hill two hundred and fifty feet high, that looks
in all directions over sea and land. Upon this
hill stands the citadel, for Halifax has the dis-
tinction of being the most important naval
station of the British Empire in the Western
Hemisphere, and in order to support this heavy
responsibility it is armed to the teeth.
It began its career as a fort, long ago, when
the Acadians and Indians were misbehaving,
and when its name was Chebucto. Its fortifi-
cations have grown with its growth, rather
faster indeed ; for with^ a population of less
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than 40,000, it has forts in every direction, — on
the islands in the bay, on the rim of the town,
at the navy yard, and, most conspicuous of all,
in the centre of the town is the citadel. One
could not throw a stone in Halifax without
hitting a fort. All roads lead to forts, and
every walk terminates in a fort.
The United States needs only to look at
her sister sitting serene among her forts to feel
how excellent is peace.
Halifax itself is a disappointment, — one
might even say a shock. After having been
advised to " go there " all one's life, one finally
goes, to find this city of great expectations
neither beautiful nor picturesque, in short,
nothing better than commonplace, a mere hud-
dle of narrow gloomy streets and cheap build-
ings ; and it is dirty, too, being addicted to the
intemperate use of soft coal, — a pernicious
habit which spoils so many towns in the United
States which might be charming but for it.
One feels resentment, too, toward Halifax
for being a mean city when nature has been
so lavish with her sparkling waters, her pic-
turesque hills, and her enchanting outlooks.
Halifax, set as she is, ought to be a gem, a
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delight to the eye. She ought to be ashamed
of being less than that.
But she is not a gem, and she is not ashamed.
She is puffed up with pride. She is proud of
her soldiers and of her forts, of her parks, and
of her public buildings, and of her harbour.
She has red-coated soldierr^^ and many of them.
They are more numerous even than the forts,
and they are always on the streets, where they
lend a certain appearance of festivity to the
otherwise dull town. Their presence is deco-
rative, but individually these soldiers are not
very impressive. Many of them are certainly
round-shouldered ; and with their bright red
coats and tiny round caps perched on an angle
c^ the head and held in place by straps under
the chin, they look so irresistibly like the long-
tailed gentleman who sits on the hand-organ
and doffs his cap for pennies, that it is difficult
to contemplate them with the respect due to
their glorious calling. They are gathered in
from the remote districts of the mother coun-
try, and present the appearance of having been
gathered recently and before they were quite
ripe.
As to the forts, if a city wishes to glory in
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the appliances of war, Halifax undoubtedly has
cause. Naturally one's first visit is to the
citadel rising from the heart of the town.
Until recently strangers were not allowed to
enter it, but now any one is welcome to walk
about the ramparts and look down into the
moat ; but no stranger may go inside the fort
nor make any drawings of any part of It, nor
use the reprehensible kodak, as a wicked
" American " was caught doing some years
ago, to the confusion of the British Govern-
ment and the betrayal of the mighty citadel of
Halifax. He probably wanted the pictures for
his album, but his Innocent thirst for photo-
graphic distinction resulted In closing the cita-
del to his countrymen for several years.
There is a fine view from the citadel, and the
town lies spread at one's feet with all its sins
upon it. But, after all, there is a certain quaint
flavour about the place, and the water-front is
in part really picturesque, with the ships from
all ports of the world lying at anchor or un-
loading at the wharves.
Whatever may or may not be said for the
city of Halifax itself, there is no fault to be
found with its very beautiful harbour. The
136
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people say it is one of the finest harbours in
the whole world, and notwithstanding their
interested statement one can easily believe it.
Halifax has its Public Gardens within the
town; and just outside is Point Pleasant Park,
a large tract of land for the most part in a state
of nature, and very charming nature, with its
forest trees and outcropping rocks and its out-
looks over land and water. At one point a
little patch of Scotch heather is growing. How
it came there we did not learn, whether by ac-
cident or design, and how long it will remain
we cannot predict, as visitors are allowed to
gather it without restraint.
Unfortunately, Halifax yields to the weak-
ness of boasting of her public buildings ; and it
is only after the " Government House," the
" Parliament House," and the new freestone
post-office have been fairly faced and found
wanting according to non-provincial standards
of beauty and magnificence, that the disappoint-
ment in Halifax as a city is complete.
There is a tradition to the effect that woollen
and leather goods are very cheap and of un-
usual excellence in this highly fortified town,
but like other traditions this has but a slight
137
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foundation in fact, with the exception of the
English travclHng rugs.
These were a delight to the eye and a men-
ace to the purse, as it was impossible to refrain
from buying more than we needed, — an act of
extravagance w.iich we basely excused by cast-
ing the blame upon Cape Breton. For thither
we were bound ; and we hope any one will agree
with us that it would not be safe to enter that
frigid region without several English travelling
rugs of fine texture and pleasing colours.
Halifax still keeps market-day. Its observ-
ance is not as important as formerly, when on
that day only could the citizens get their
garden supplies. Now there are shops where
fresh vegetables are sold as in other cities, and
the old market-days — Wednesday and Satur-
day — have lessened in importance and no
doubt in pomp. Their chief patrons now are
the poorer class of housekeepers, yet one being
in Halifax on market-day should certainly visit
the market. Its scene of action is the side-
walks and streets around the post-office square.
Here at n early hour the country folk with
their loads begin to congregate.
The visitor would do well to go rather early
138
var-'Y W'^W
Halifax
in the morning before the crowd of buyers
has assembled, else, jostled by the throng,
he will find himself in a position analogous
to that of the hero in "Yankee Doodle" who
" could not see the town there were so many
houses."
One cannot see the market there are so
many people. When seen in the autumn it
consists of many waggons bearing loads of
bloomy cabbages, yellow shining pumpkins,
brown-skinned potatoes, red beets, yellow car-
rots, and other cheery-looking vegetables,
backed up against the curbstone.
What is there about newly gathered vege-
tables that makes one always want to stop and
look ? It is something besides their bright
colours and their picturesque effect. It is faint
memories of happy childhood hours spent on the
farm, and beyond that it is the love — latent or
active — in every heart, for mother earth, from
whose bosom come these gifts.
The waggons and their loads were the best
part of the show. Far outnumbering them
were the men, women, and boys, chiefly women,
who stood or sat on the curbstones surrounded
by baskets of things to sell — or there might
139
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Down North and Up Alon^
be but one small basket containing the week's
gleanings from the home-patch.
Eggs were so plenty that we were In danger
of literally " walking on eggs," and we picked
our way in fear and trembling. Baskets con-
taining little deep-red, upland cranbei.ies or
dark blue huckleberries gaily called our atten-
tion from the all-absorbing eggs, and one little
old grandmother had come with two or three
pints of belated red raspberries.
Near by a woman had a plucked fowl and
a handful of parsley.
A boy sat listlessly beside a pail of snails,
unconscious that they were seizing the oppor-
tunity to crawl over the sides of their prison
and away from culinary distinction, down the
crowded sidewalk in a vain search for the sea.
A man near by had a leg of lamb in his
basket, and another had three large eels that
acted as if they would like to follow the ex-
ample set by the snails, but their keeper was
alert and their hopes defeated by circumstances
over which they had no control.
One corner was bright with the flower-
venders, who presented large trays of migno-
nette, sweet peas, and many old-fashioned
340
Halifax
garden posies to the passer-by, while near them
the herb-woman held enormous bouquets of
gray-looking herbs that exhaled a savour of
coming turkey-dressing and seed-cakes. Not
far from the flower-women were gathered to-
gether some " Preston Negroes " with their
contributions of eggs and onions. They were
the basket-makers for this whole camp, for
everything was displayed in baskets, most of
them after one pattern, and all made by the
negroes of Preston. They were pretty baskets,
strong and of unique design.
Of course there were Indians. What would
an open-air market in the north amount to
without them ? They were across the street
and by themselves, and truth compels one to
confess they were not interesting. They hadj,
as it were, fallen between the races, and pos-
sessed neither the charm of the savage nor the
advantages of the civilised state. Most of
them were half-breeds, and all of them were
dressed in the cast-off clothing of rhe white
people. They had toy bows and arrows for
s.ile and tawdry ornaments such as can be
bought by the quantity in any city of the
United States. But they added some pictur-
141
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csqueness to the scene, as in colour and features
they were still Indian.
Fruit was a luxury in Halifax. The open-
air market was bright with vegetables and
flowers, but with the exception of cranberries,
huckleberries, and small sour plums there was
no native fruit to gladden the eye or refresh
the palate. So we had concluded, when sud-
denly our glance fell upon a booth as bright
as the flower-trays with its assortment of
beautiful peaches, pears, and plums. Surely
this was remarkable fruit to be matured in a
northern climate, but to our amusement the
vender pointed to his wares and with mis-
placed pride uttered the disillusioning word
— California !
The negro in Halifax is an anomaly. He
is hardly seen elsewhere in Nova Scotia, but
here there are so many that one keeps ques-
tioning the latitude. Surely one has made a
mistake and gone " down South " instead of
"down North." But a glance at the early
history of Halifax makes the mystery clear.
From its beginning this town seems to have
been a place for the reception of outcasts of
various sorts.
I4t
Halifax
Thither came the fugitive negroes from the
cotton States of the South, and thither were
sent the insurgent Maroons from the island
of Jamaica. The history of the Maroons is
not the least romantic episode connected with
the history of Halifax.
It seems that upon the conquest of Jamaica
by the English in 1655 ^^^ Spaniards pos-
sessed a large number of African slaves.
These people, called Maroons, refused to sub-
mit to English rule, but fled to the mountains,
where they exercised their ingenuity in harass-
ing the English. After a long-continued and
desperate resistance they were finally subdued,
and some six hundred of them sent to Halifax.
His Royal Highness, Prince Edward, then
commander-in-chief at Halifax, being g ;atly
impressed with the orderly and handsome
appearance of these people, set them to work
at the fortifications on Citadel Hill, paying
them th< same amount that other labourers
were paid. We were told that the " Maroon
bastion** remains as a monument of their
industry.
All went well until cold weather came and
the negroes were removed to Preston — a few
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miles from Halifax and across the harbour —
to spend the winter. Then the people from
Jamaica, half frozen and half starved, wanted
to go home, refused to do any more work,
then or afterwards, and became generally
riotous. Finally, the well disposed were re-
moved to a place near the harbour of Halifax,
where they probably formed the nucleus to
the picturesque settlement which we passed
upon our approach to that city.
In 1800 the troublesome Maroons at Pres-
ton were sent to Sierra Leone, having cost
both Jamaica and the British Government a
very large sum of money.
Other importations and exportatlons of the
coloured race followed, Preston being always
one of the centres of their settlement ; and the
pretty brown-skinned girls who sit on the
curbstone every market day with their berries
and eggs are descendants of those insurgents
from sunny Jamaica or of the fugitives from
the cotton fields of the United States. It is
said the negroes are not yet reconciled to the
climate of Nova Scotia — small wonder that
they are not ! — and though many of them were
born there, they sigh for the palms of the
144
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Halifax
traditional land of their ancestors and have
little zest for the fir-trees of the North.
One wonders whether it was the custom of
sending disaffected people to Halifax that orig-
inated the historic advice, perhaps less common
now than formerly, to " go to Halifax.'*
To go there, however, is not wholly a punish-
ment, and there is no reason why it might not
become a very agreeable place to " go to " in
the summer-time. One misses the tides of
Fundy here, and there is no doubt that their
sudden loss has upon the mind of the traveller
the effect of belittling the charming coast about
Halifax. All other shores seem tame for a
long time after one has known the mighty rise
and fall of the waters of the Bay of Fundy.
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XI
TOWARD CAPE BRETON
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To turn our backs upon Halifax was
to turn our faces toward Cape Breton
Island, that unknown land of hoped-
for adventure that lay farther away
"down north."
We went by rail as far as Truro, through a
desolate region of stunted fir-trees and loose
rocks like that with which the journey to Hali-
fax had made us familiar. Yet, after all, this
depressing country may be about to yield up
some mineral treasure that will make it blos-
som like the rose in the mind's eye of its
owner. For in this strange land valuable min-
erals are ever being discovered in unexpected
places. Indeed, not far from this very region
that we have scorned, gold mines have been
found hidden among the hills.
The gnomes of the rocks seem to have
selected Nova Scotia as their own particular
work-shop, where they have fitted together
their strange mosaics of multiform geological
X46
T'oward Cape Breton
formations, their rocks marvellous, and their
minerals and metals precious or curious. Fine
gold, coal, iron, and gypsum have made Nova
Scotia famous the world over, and to these the
queer rocky mineral-packed peninsula adds
marketable amounts of silver, tin, zinc, copper,
manganese, plumbago, pottery clay, terra alba,
salt, granite, marble, slate, limestone, and grind-
stones. Doubtless this is but a tithe of what
she could do an she would, and of what she
will render up in the future.
Although we did not as tourists take pleas-
ure in the scrubby country around Halifax, nor
care for the commercial value of its products,
we are persuaded that the geologist would find
it of surpassing interest.
Shubenacadie is one of the early stops after
leaving Halifax. Naturally one looks forward
with anticipation to meeting a place with such
a name. But what is in a name? Certainly
nothing so far as the actual village of that dis-
tinguished appellation is concerned.
Shubenacadie! "abounding in ground-nuts'*
— and also in Micmac Indians. The Shuben-
acadie of our imaginations continued to abound
in these things ; but Shubenacadie the actual,
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alas ! contained its whole stock of romance in
its name. If it had ground-nuts, it did not
show them to us, nor did it bring forth any
Indians.
Truro was as disappointing as Shubenacadie,
for the maps placed it at the head of Cobe-
quid Bay, the extreme eastern end of Minas
Basin, and it was but natural that we should
expect to see the waters of Fundy there once
more. Not so. Truro is two miles from the
bay, a bustling, manufacturing town of no at-
tractions, but with a great deal of smoke and
noise.
A few miles away, however, is Maitland, near
the mouth of the Shubenacadie River, — a
famous spot, we were assured, for the highest
of high tides, rips, and bores. This might be
so, — we hoped it was, — but we did not go to
see. We nad pursued rips and bores to the
limits of human endurance, and if they were
at Maitland — well, we sincerely hoped they
would stay there.
Out of Truro we left the desolate waste of
stunted firs and loose stones and went speed-
ing along "he shores of a river with bright red
banks, where maples, oaks, and birches mingled
148
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'Toward Cai)e Breton
I
with the dark evergreens. The way grew
wilder, and we had the exhilarating feeling that
at last we were getting away from the beaten
track of the tourist.
Great beds of tilted and folded rock strata
rose above the train ; all sorts of geological
ft mations thrust themselves into our notice.
The rocks here are not concealed and covered
jealously from the inquisitive eye, as they are
on most of the surface of the earth, but they
stand forth to be looked at.
Even in the swift passing of the train we
saw enough to make us bow before the mighty
forces of fire and ice that so wonderfully had
rolled up the rocks like scrolls to be read, bent
the strata of stone as though they had been
of parchment, and opened the secret places,
scooping out valleys here and burying moun-
tains there.
Then about us the hills rose, — hills of stone,
also the work of the colossal forces that yet
slumber in the heart of the earth. Time had
covered these hills with soil and verdure, how-
ever ; and they stood above and about one
another in fine groupings, their noble slopes
exquisitely coloured with golden-rod and pearly
149
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Down North and Up Along
everlasting, and where uncut they were over-
grown with silvery, tawny grass.
One expected to see sheep scampering over
the near hills as the train approached and un-
concernedly nibbling on the distant ones, but
this was not the case. Only here and there a
woolly brother or two or three were to be seen
upon these exquisite flower-painted heights.
Acres of fireweed had taken possession of
the burned tracts along the side of the rail-
road, mercifully covering the naked and scarred
earth, as is their habit, their long pods curling
open in a charming tracery of brown lines and
freeing glistening clouds of silky white plumed
seeds, to fly on the wind and find out other
sore spots that needed their redeeming presence.
The earth was not greatly harassed by culti-
vation ; grass grew freely, making now a tawny
background to the coloured patterns of golden-
rod, asters, and everlasting.
The little village of Hopewell lies among
the hills 'n the happiest manner, in apparent
realisation of the wish expressed in its name.
Its houses are vine-covered, as hope-well houses
ought to be, and there are flowers to profusion
in the dooryards, — real Digby flowers.
150
'Toward Cape Breton
We had undoubtedly entered a new world.
The depressing sense of commonplaceness had
disappeared ; life began to be again original and
beautiful. The houses were picturesque, and
so were the well-sweeps that stood against the
sky.
There appeared distant blue highlands
beyond the foreground of tawny hillsides.
Autumn tints were beginning to soften the
woods on all sides ; and a long irregular lake
sparkled down below us, with curving shores
and fairy-like islands on its blue bosom, the
whole enveloped in a haze like that which
comes in Indian summer.
The country began to look unfamiliar and
a little foreign. The brakeman's name was
Sandy, and when he called out West Bemigo-
mish^ with the accent on the last syllable,
and with a Scotch flavour difficult to transmit,
we knew we had passed beyond the petty cares
of a vapid civilisation and were indeed nearing
those dangerous mountain passes, those marshes
and Scotch highlands of which we had heard
and long had dreamed.
We sped past more rounded hills, often
shaven and shorn of their hay, and often lovely
151
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with their fleecy uncut grass exquisitely inter-
mingled with golden-rod, aster, and ever-
lasting.
" Merigoww^ / " Sandy's pleasant, sonorous
voice announced the getting-oiF place for the
village which is not in sight, hut which we hope
is as attractive as its name, lying as it does at
the mouth of the deep-blue bay that comes
close enough for us to admire.
MerigowwA.' One should hear Sandy an-
nounce this, to get an idea of what the word
can contain of joyousness and jollity. It rings
out the merriest of any towns' names I ever
heard; and if Merigo^/j>^ is half as agreeable
as the sound of its name as delivered by Sandy
the brakeman, I for one should like to live
there.
Beyond Merigomish the mountains rise close
at hand. They are not p^rand or terrifying, but
they ascend with an ample serenity that is
restful. They are wooded for the most part
with spruces and firs, lightened, however, by ex-
panses of bright-green deciduous trees. One
needs evergreens to bring out the quality of
the lighter greens, and also by their severity of
form to give character to the nearer hills. In
152
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Toward Cape Breton
the distance their shapes are lost, and their dark
green makes black masses like deep shadows in
the midst of the lighter foliage.
We left the mountains only to find them
again a little farther on. The near farmhouses
looked pretty and comfortable, and there was
an occasional apple-tree bearing very small
apples, as though it knew what was expected
of it, and would fulfil its duty as best it could,
though its hard-borne fruit was " apple " in
form only.
And then, beyond the mountains, up against
the sky, lay distant blue highlands like a dream
in their loveliness.
Nearer to the mountain sped the train, until
we found ourselves climbing the side of it and
looking across the mist-filled valleys of another
mountain, its sides all sheep-coloured or clothed
with fir-trees.
We hastened through a continually chang-
ing hill country that raised high our hopes of
Cape Breton, for the landscape grew more in-
teresting as we went on.
We left the mountains, and the country
settled into a rounded hilliness, always agree-
able and always covered with the soft green
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Down North and Up Along
plush of shorn meadows or the silvery, tawny
grass.
At one place we passed a village lying in the
stony bed of an ancient water-course, the little
silver stream purling adown its spine being
the only remnant of a once mighty torrent
that had carved out the valley. Instead of
the flood of long ago elm-trees now occupy
the dry river-bed. They stood about the
houses, fair, foreign forms in this stern land of
fir-trees.
Antigo«/V^.' the accent of all these names
ending in nish or mish is on the last syllable.
Sandy sings it out powerfully, but it does not
dance like the light-hearted Merigomish.
It is a pleasant enough place, but one might
pass it unheeded, did one not know that here
dwells the Bishop of Arichat, that here is the
St. Francis Xavier College, and here the Cathe-
dral of St. Ninian, one of the finest in Canada.
Here, too, are large cheese-factories that minis-
ter to the temporal needs of the people. Here,
moreover, the people are descendants of the
Scotch Highlanders who settled these shores
in the early part of the century, and here the
wild Gaelic speech may yet be heard, the cathe-
154
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dral services being part of the time conducted
in that tongue. Considering all this, it is not
surprising that Antigonish is a large settlement.
It is said to draw a large part of its revenue
from its foggy Newfoundland brethren whom
it supplies with cheese and other provisions —
at a good profit.
We stayed only a moment at Antigonish, but
sped away and away and past a blue lake at the
foot of blue hills. The haymakers were busy
on its marshy shores with "he last cutting of
the reason, women with turned-up petticoats
and bright handkerchiefs over their heads, and
men plying the decadent scythe.
Marshy lakes and low-lying hills, beautiful
in the light of a poetic day, made charming
this part of the journey, and then of a sudden
the sea came into view, deep blue in the hazy
atmosphere with distant shores of heavenly
colouring.
Straight poplars and venerable willows
greeted us as we entered the Acadian village
of Tracadle. Seen in this light, with the en-
chanting blues of the distant sea and the near
inlets, with the fair shores and the picturesque
group of gray-shingled buildings, the monastery
155
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Down No7'th and Up Along
of the Trappist Brothers, Tracadie seemed the
fairest of all the fair sights we had seen that
day or in many a day.
It is wonderful what loveliness a certain light
can give to the scene upon which it falls. That
day of days, with a golden haze in the air that
obscured nothing, but lent glow and colour to
everything, the hills and towns were enchant-
ing, and Tracadie, as we came upon it bathed
in the afternoon light, might have been a vision
of the Elysian Fields.
Later the same country was traversed on a
dull, dead day when everything looked real,
when the landscape lay flat and no golden light
and atmospheric life made ethereal the hills and
valleys, and Tracadie the beautiful had van-
ished ; we could scarcely believe the evidence of
the time-table, the name of the station, and
Sandy's confirmatory announcement, when we
saw Tracadie bereft of her halo. Beautiful
delusion of the atmosphere, could one but
always travel when sun and air were in loving
dalliance.
The events of individual human life are not
very noticeable from the window of a railway
train, but one little drama we saw enacted by
156
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Toward Cape Breton
the wayside. A tiny cottage stood on a hill-
top near the track ; and in the dooryard sat
an old man and an old woman, at work upon
something, we could not see what. As the
train swept past, the old man stood erect and,
raising both arms above his head, waved fran-
tically. The engine responded with a shrill
salute, whereupon the old man bent himself in
a profound courtesy almost to the earth. We
flew on wondering, and presently Sandy an-
nounced " Harbour au Bouche " with a queer
Scotch accent to the French name. We were
less interested in Harbour au Bouche than in
Cape Porcupine, a bold headland higher than
Blomidon, and, one should think, worthy of a
more dignified title, for while one is willing to
allow picturesqueness to a porcupine, no one
would think of claiming dignity for that spiny
act of nature. Cape Porcupine was outlined
against the blue sea, and in a few moments we
reached that sea, and also Port Mulgrave, the
end of the road.
We stood upon Canso's shore gazing across
at Cape Breton, the goal of our desire. The
Gut of Canso it is that makes an island of
Breton.
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Sydney, for we were not bound that way.
Others might go on to prosperous Sydney
and historical Louisburg; but as for us, we
preferred to step aboard the little steamer
ready to puff its way through the shining
Bras d'Or waters to Baddeck.
There is little tide in the Bras d'Or lakes.
Their entrance does not receive the waters
freely enough to cause them to pile up, as is
the case in the Bay of Fundy ; on the con-
trary, the force of the rising tide is dissipated
before the water gets into this inland sea
which lies in its land-bound basin, calm and
peaceful.
The Bras d'Or lakes are pleasant sheets
of water with pretty wooded shores, though
on the whole the scenery is not remarkable.
It is very peaceful and pleasing, however, and
there are many lovely coves and points of
land along the shore. And there is always
the invigorating northern air to fill one with
its refreshing life.
Baddeck lies on the shores of an inlet be-
hind a point of land that separates it from
the Little Bras d'Or Lake. We found it the
simple sleepy hamlet we had hoped for. Its
164
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Baddeck
one street was unpaved, and Its shops wore
a submissive air of having done no business
for several generations — with one exception.
There is one store of general merchandise of
such modern aspect and such activity as to
seem wholly out of place in Baddeck.
But on the whole the village preserved the
same Sunday-like serenity that so puzzled the
genial author of " Baddeck and that Sort of
Thing," since whose visit years enough have
passed to revolutionise "American" politics
and see the rise and fall of more than one large
"American" city, yet there sits Baddeck on
thz shore of her Bras d'Or, just as she sat
then, excepting that the old jail has made way
for a new one. It was explained to us that
the last prisoners put in the old one had dug
holes in the wall and got out ; to further in-
quiry our informant answered apologetically
that he did n't think there were any prisoners
in the jail now, but added, as though to vin-
dicate the honour of the town, that they some-
times had one.
Baddeck is just as good and just as quiet
to-day as it ever was, v/ith the exception of
its one flourishing store ; and that no doubt is
165
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Down North a7id Up Along
the result of " American " influence, for there
is a large house on the point known as Red
Head, across the water, and from a tall flag-
staff near it floats the stars and stripes. It is
the residence of Mr. Alexander G. Bell, the
inventor of the Bell telephone ; and some two
miles or more up the road to the north are
two or three other houses from whose tall flag-
staff's floats the emblem of our kind of freedom.
In one lives Mr. George Kennan, not beloved
by the Czar of Russia, and every summer a
greater or less number of citizens from the
United States find their way to the cool
breezes of Baddeck.
Yes, there is one other " Improvement" at
Baddeck, a brick custom-house and post-office
that we at first mistook for the jail.
There is a curious sense of disjointedness
about Baddeck and its surroundings. The
houses seem set around anywhere, and the Bras
d'Or shares the general sense of confusion.
The water-view ought to be beautiful, with
points of land reaching into the lake, islands
in the channel, and between the points of land
a broad opening across the main body of water.
But there is lacking that necessary something
i66
Baddeck
we call " composition;" things are not placed
quite right with respect to one another, and
the proportions are not good. Such is the im-
pression one gets from the village itself, but
on the higher land back of the village there
are points of view from which Baddeck on the
water's edge, with its diversified water-view in
the background, is charming indeed.
Whether Baddeck is old or young depends
upon the point of view. In 1793 it had ten
white inhabitants, which is ten more than Chi-
cago had at the same time. But Chicago had
something of an agaric nature which in litde
more than half a century has caused it to spring
to the ungainly size of over a million, while
Baddeck has had a slow and solid growth of
nine hundred within a century.
Baddeck's first inhabitants were disbanded
soldiers, and her people now are largely com-
posed of the Scotch who have moved to this
part of Cape Breton. The names over her
shop doors are Rory McLeod, Sandy McLane,
Murdoch McPherson, or similar Scotch cog-
nomens. The place is largely Presbyterian,
though a little building still gathers the people
of the Church of England under its wing.
167
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The Presbyt'jrian Church, large and barn-
like, stands on the hill behind the town, and
there is still observed the custom of repeating
the services in Gaelic, — for the back-country
people have not forgotten their mother-tongue ;
in fict, many of the old people know no other.
The difference between Sunday and other
days at Baddeck is not observable in the in-
creased stillness of the place, — that is not
necessary even for Sunday, — but that one can
then go to church. One can go to the Pres-
byterian church and listen to a Gaelic service,
which is what every stranger does.
Sometimes an English service precedes the
Gaelic, which makes the meeting rather long,
but sometimes proceedings begin — and end —
with a Gaelic prayer-meeting, which was the
case the day we went.
The congregation, composed mainly of
elderly and unlettered back-country folk, con-
tained few young people and fewer children.
The leader, who was not unlettered and who
had a fine voice, opened the meeting by reading
in Gaelic. Then gaunt men rose and prayed,
standing perfectly still and betraying no emo-
tion in voice or by gesture. They spoke in
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Baddeck
low mumbling tones that to us soon became a
monotonous drone of unfamiliar sounds.
One by one they got up and prayed and sat
down, until we began to weary exceedingly
from sitting still so long on the hard wooden
seats, and were inconsistently thankful for
the law which excludes women from also
taking part in public services. Fortunately
the praying was interspersed by singing, which
caused us for the time to forget weariness
and to become lost in wonder, if not in
admiration.
The leader sang metrical Psalms in a voice
that was not without dignity and music; the
melody was entirely unknown to us, and at a
curious up-slide at the end of each phrase, the
congregation joined in a chorus difficult to de-
scribe. There came a deep crash and burr of
male voices, embroidered, so to speak, by the
most astonishing and unrelated high soprano
embellishments from the women. It was
amazing, unexpectedly and finely barbaric, re-
taining a strong flavour of vanished centuries
when all the wild northern hordes struggled
for supremacy, and when the inspiration to
their music was the crashing of waves on the
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wild coast, the shrieking of the tempest, and
the cries of war. We both thought of wind
and water surging about a rocky coast as we
listened, and there was also a suggestion of the
droning of bagpipes in the male voices.
When the services finally ended, the collec-
tion was taken, and it amounted to only a few
large copper pennies.
There were Indians at Baddeck. They
come in the summer as to a watering-place, for
change and recreation and to glean an occa-
sional penny from the " American " visitors,
and to sell baskets of their own manufacture
to whoever is in need of baskets. Their en-
campment was on a steep hillside on the edge
of the village. It consisted of half-a-dozen
wigwams covered with birch-bark and shaped
very much like the pointed firs that surrounded
them.
Thin columns of blue smoke were rising
from two or three camp-fires one morning as
we drew near, and we saw an iron pot hung
over each fire by a cord from two sticks set up
cross-wise. Here was genuine Indian at last !
but not unmarred by contact with the dominant
race, after all, — for they were unbecomingly
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Baddeck
clad in the cast-ofF clothing of their white
neighbours.
The romance of Micmac Indian life is very
greatly enhanced by distance. They live al-
most as simply as wild animals, but they are
not nearly as clean. Why is it one never
sees a dirty squirrel and never a clean Indian ?
Unless, indeed, both have the misfortune to
be captured by civilised man, when the method
of their lives may become reversed, and the
squirrel through vile captivity grows dirty,
while the Indian becomes clean through en-
forced scrubbing by the Government.
There was a white child in this camp, a little
girl of seven or eight, and the wildest-eyed child
we ever had seen. She was dirty like the rest,
and at our approach fled as though the bad
spirit were after her. We saw her later caress-
ing a fat squaw, who vigorously elbowed her
away. We learned her story, which was not a
pleasant one, her own mother having given her
to the Indians. Poor baby, with her bright yel-
low hair, and her skin gleaming white in spite of
the dirt, what is to be her fate, brought up like
a little animal in the midst of a race whose
every impulse is opposed to her own ?
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Besides a number of Indian children, there
were little dogs about the camp, as miserable-
looking as starved little dogs could be, and
there was a kitten with a woolly coat like a
sheep. It was a desperate-looking kitten, and
who can tell whether its woolly coat was due
to the vermin that certainly infested it, or to
some un-catlike, and ghoulish foreknowledge
such as is said to be possessed by potato-skins,
corn-husks, and gophers, of a hard winter which
must be prepared for.
As we receded from the camp, the pointed
wigwams shining white and tawny with their
covering of birch-bark, the blue lines of smoke
wavering up to the sky, the moving forms
of children, made a picture pleasant to look
upon.
173
m
XIII
ENGLISKTOWN
WE did not go to Baddeck wholly
for Baddeck's sake, but as well to
make it a starting-point for the
plateau to the north which we meant
to traverse, roads permitting, all the way to the
fcold headland that fronts the icy sea and ends
the land in this direction.
The people there are Scotch Highlanders of
good repute, they having succeeded an older
population of bad fame and piratical habits.
Cape North and its Highland fisher-folk had
been recommended to us at Parrsboro by Mr.
Gibbons, a unique and beautiful character, pas-
tor of the Church of England, and lovingly
called by his people "Parson Gibbons." He
is the only person of Esquimaux blood, so far
as we know, who has made a name for himself.
He wore an expression of great sweetness
and earnestness, and was a man of so much
education and culture that it was a pleasure to
listen to him. His indomitable courage had
173
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Down North and Up Along
enabled him to surmount all obstacles and take
his place in the field of work he had chosen
and in the society that his education had fitted
him iox.
He had ministered iox a number of years to
the people of Cape North, as no one had done
before, and as no one has done since. He
loved them, that we could see, as in his sym-
pathetic way he told us of them, of their hard
lives, their idiosyncrasies and their virtues, and
although he had a quick sense of humour there
was ever love shining back of his laughter.
He mapped out the route for us from Bad-
deck to the extreme end of Cape North, and
told us where and with whom to stay along the
road.
At Baddeck, we learned much of Parson
Gibbons' work, how he had gone once a month
the whole length of Cape North, often walking
the distance of one hundred miles over moun-
tains and through swamps. More than once
he had stumbled into a friend's house, on his
return from the north, quite exhausted and
with blood-stained shoes.
No other name is so well known and so
loved on that rude coast, as we were soon to
174
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Knglishtown
learn, for even the faces of the children that had
been born since he left lighted when we spoke
of him. His memory is handed down to the
younger generations ; and all, old and young
alike, when we were there, fondly believed that
he would some day return to them. But that
he will not do, for since this book was begun
the brave and gentle spirit has passed from its
mortal toil. His death was the result of in-
juries received when stopping a pair of runa-
way horses, saving the lives of those in the
carriage.
At one end of the village of Baddeck stands
a little church of unique appearance, which is
one of eight in different parts of Cape Breton
and Nova Scotia which the great courage and
perseverance of Parson Gibbons had built,
some of them in places where another would
have seen no possibility of erecting so much as
a shed.
We were obliged to remain in Baddeck for
several days, partly on account of the weather,
and partly to make the necessary preparations
for the peculiar journey we had undertaken.
One cannot start into the wilderness without
forethought, and we had received such contra-
175
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Down North and Up Along
dictory information concerning the resources
for travellers " down north " that we determined
to take with us the necessaries of life. In
other words, we were to become a pair of
gypsies for a couple of weeks.
Of course we had to drive, and for this a
horse and waggon were necessary. A waggon
in which one must take a long journey is good
or bad according to the nature of its seat.
Only those who have tried know how few
vehicles have seats that are not a mortification
to the spirit of man after he has sat upon them
for three consecutive hours. Now, to select a
waggon solely for the comfort of its seat may
produce peculiar results. It did in our case.
We desired to present as respectable an ap-
pearance upon this somewhat Quixotic journey
as circumstances permitted, but circumstances
did not permit of anything better than a small
and topless vehicle very much the worse for
wear, and with what paint still remained worn
to a dull and ashy gray. But it was strong
and had a comfortable seat.
It had to be built up in the back to accom-
modate our load ; and as the addition was made
with new boards which there was no time to
176
Rnglishtown
have painted, the result was not quite what we
should have been willing to exhibit to some of
our — happily distant — friends and relatives.
But the people of Cape Breton are not criti-
cal; and as a good many of them do their
own walking, our outfit was regarded beyond
the town with envy and as an indication of very
great wealth and pride.
Quite as important as the waggon was the
horse ; and Mr. A., genial landlord of the new
Bras d'Or hotel, introduced Dan to as as the
one horse in all Baddeck or in all the world
suited to our needs.
Dan was a rather small chestnut with a white
star in his forehead ; he had a straight neck, a
tender mouth, a somewhat mincing gait, and
he was a little stiff in the legs upon first starting
out. He hated to back and he had a nervous
fear of the whip. But to offset all this he had
a large kind eye and as true a heart as ever
beat in the breast of a horse.
Appearances were certainly against the dear
old fellow, and we remember with regret that we
rejected him after a short trial drive. But Mr.
A. assured us so impressively that Dan was
willing to cross ferries that fortunately for us
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we finally took him, though we did it under
protest. We could not then understand why
willingness to cross ferries should count so
mightily in his favour. Our very narrow-
minded idea of a " ferry," based upon those by
which one enters or leaves New York City, was
to become broadened to an extent we did not
dream of then.
" Down North " is applicable to any journey
northward from the southernmost point of
Nova Scotia. " Up along," like the same
term on Cape Cod, is used of travelling along
the edge of the land, that long strip by the
sea which in both Cape Cod and Cape North
is the portion most generally inhabited. So
when we left Baddeck — or perhaps better, left
Englishtown — we might technically be said to
be going " up along."
A clear, cool morning dawned about the
middle of September. The waggon was ready ;
and Dan, shining from a most unusual polishing,
the last grooming he was likely to get until he
returned to his own stable, with a strong
harness on his back and new shoes on his feet,
v/aited our pleasure.
Into the back of the waggon were packed a
178
Rnglishtown
few necessary personal effects and also sundry
culinary articles of iron or tin and a quantity of
provisions. A white canvas cloth, attached to
the seat, was drawn tightly over the load at the
back, steadying and holding it in place, and
incidentally giving it the effect of a peddler's
pack or an emigrant's outfit. Mr. A. gener-
ously tied his own fishing-rod to the back of
the seat with our umbrellas, over which were
thrown the bright new Halifax rugs that must
have felt a little indignant at the figure they
were made to cut. M.'s sketching materials
stood against the dashboard, and under our
feet, to her dismay, was a tin can of worms
which the stable boy at the last moment con-
tributed for bait, also a wrench, and a bottle
of oil to grease the wheels.
As there was no room for it inside, Mr. A.
had dexterously with a long rope tied a bushel
of oats and " cut feed " in a bag to the back
springs, not improving their action thereby, but
adding materially to the general emigrant effect.
We finally started, moving down the main
street of Baddeck with what dignity circum-
stances permitted, while the Sandys, Rorys, and
Murdochs stood at the doors of the moribund
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Down North and Up Along
shops with their hands in their pockets, and
looked on, speechless, smileless, and respectful.
In a few moments we were out of town,
facing expectantly toward Cape North, that
mysterious headland a hundred miles away, the
road to which was said to be wild and lonely,
obstructed by mountains and marshes, and
traversed by an occasional Highlander. Be-
tween us and these perils we had only Dan,
with his new shoes, his strong harness, and his
kind eye.
We jogged along the road to the northwest,
following an arm of the Bras d'Or that makes
up there and is known as Baddeck Bay.
We passed the cottages of the stars and stripes
and bade adieu to them as though they had been
our friends.
Miles of wild fir forest succeeded to the blue
shine of the bay. Moss bearded the trees and
carpeted the bankti ; pretty snowberry vines
strayed over the moss. Innumerable bridges
intercepted our way, and they were all out of
repair. Under some scurried brooks, while
others seemed their own excuse for being, as
there was no water under them and no sign
that there ever had been.
180
Englishtown
It was at these bridges that Dan's virtues as
a highland traveller began to shine forth. If
his foot went through a hole, he pulled it out
and like a philosopher scorned to notice trifles.
He had a way of smelling of suspicious bridges ;
and if they exhaled no odour of security, he
gathered himself together and jumped over
them, the waggon and its occupants following,
not as they would, but as they must.
Besides the many little bridges that Dan could
jump, there were longer ones that no horse could
have jumped, and beneath them and along the
side of the road through reaches of fir-trees
dashed and tumbled and glided the wildest,
loveliest brooks we ever had dreamed of.
We went slowly along, enjoying the lovely
road and the bewitching brooks until we found
ourselves hungry. Then we stopped and had
our first gypsy meal by the roadside. We
built a fire of dry twigs on a pile of stones near
a brook in a meadow where the fence was down,
and felt very wild and gypsy-like. True gyp-
sies would have done better, however. The
smoke blew all ways at once, and the kettle
insisted upon lying upon its side and pouring
the water into the fire.
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Down Norih and Up Along
We took Dan from the waggon ; and since we
had forgotten to bring a halter we led him into
the field and bribed him by a pile of oats and
cut feed to stand still. He stood and ate the
feed, the grass beneath it, and the earth beneath
that, while we returned to the unequal contest
with the fire and forgot all about him until a
peculiar shufHing noise brought our heads out
of the smoke and fastened our startled gaze
upon him, not as we had left him, but upside-
down, his new shoes sparkling to the sky and
his harness writhing about him.
He was without doubt the happiest horse in
Cape Breton at that moment, but at our indig-
nant approach he righted hiiiiself in haste and
looked deprecatingly at us out of his large kind
eyes.
Dinner was forgotten in the puzzling occu-
pation of getting him to rights, and he was
bribed with another supply of feed to stand up.
It was the middle of the afternoon before we
sat down to our hard-earned meal, and all we
succeeded in cooking after a long and bitter
fight with our first camp fire was a pot of coffee.
Still, it paid, as any gypsy will understand.
Having attached Dan to the waggon with an
182
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Rnglishtown
optimistic trust in the goodness of misplaced
straps, we went on through another stretch of
fir woods smothered in brittle sage-green moss.
Then a clearing appeared, and we passed some-
body's potato patch where large crows were
pompously stealing potatoes. They cawed in
loud tones as we drew nearer, and went on
coolly digging up their neighbour's tubers.
They poked their stout beaks into a hill and
hauled forth a potato with an unerring aim
that suggested previous practice.
Besides the crows the woods were full of
robins. Such wild robins ! They were in
flocks and screamed at us and showed none of
the amiable characteristics of the red-breasts of
civilisation.
There were squirrels along the lovely high-
way, — tiny fellows with rusty red coats and
bushy tails, that scolded us roundly, though we
were not conscious of deserving it.
We climbed a long, circuitous, fir-covered,
brook-bordered hill, at the top of which a
noble view of St. Anne's Bay burst upon us.
From a calm sheet of blue water, mountains
rose in brooding beauty, stretching away ?.nd
away along the sea-coast to the distant blue
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Down North and Up Along
headland which was far-famed Smoky, or Cape
Enfume, as the French called It long ago, be-
cause of the crown of mist it usually wears.
The contour of the mountains opposite
Englishtown is peculiarly beautiful, the lines
of the spurs as they overlap each other are
fine, and the ever-changing yet eternal moun-
tains of beauty are repeated in reflections on
the water below.
We know no lovelier spot than English-
town, lying on the lower swells of elevations
that rise almost as high as do the mountains
across the bay.
Englishtown is enveloped in a mantle of
romance besides that of her beautiful moun-
tains and bay. One is astonished to know
how old the place is, and that St. Anne Bay
wa3 an important and stirring fishing port
contended for by both French and English
when New York City was still a quiet Dutch
burg. Indeed, the first settlements there ante-
date the founding of Port Royal. But St. Anne's
history is full of vicissitudes; and though re-
peatedly settled by the French and English
alternately, no permanent village of any size
or importance has as yet been founded there.
184
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In 1597 the English ship " Chancewell " came
to grief in the usually safe harbour and was
wickedly pillaged by the French fishermen
settled along the coast. Captain Leigh, com-
mander of the " Chancewell," tells us that
" there came aboard many shallops with great
store of Frenchmen, who robbed and spoiled all
they could lay their hands on, pillaging the poor
men even to their very shirts, and using them
in savage manner ; whereas they should rather
as Christians have aided them in their distress."
In 1629, two armed ships of France, the
"Great St. Andrew" and the " Marguerite,"
occupied the harbour, and their crews, aided
by their English prisoners, built a fort to com-
mand the entrance. This fort was armed with
eight cannon, 1800 pounds of powder, pikes,
and muskets, and was garrisoned by forty
men. The arms of France and of Cardinal
Richelieu were raised over its walls, and a
chapel was erected. But before the close of
the winter, disaster thinned the ranks of the
garrison ; more than a third of the troops died
of scurvy, and to add to the confusion the
commandant assassinated his lieutenant on the
parade-ground. Later, an Indian mission was
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foutulcil Ikmv hy I'^triuh Jesuits, hut prosper-
ity did not attend tlusc cHorts, and soon lioth
garrison and mission were rcniovcil.
In a French Iwok, written l)y 'I'hoinas
Pinclion and translateil into l\nglisli in 1760,
we get a very good ilescription of St. Anne,
or lV)rt Dauphin, us it was then called.
" Port Dauphin is a very fine harhiiur, two Icapnes
in circumference. It is almost entirely shut up hy a
nock of land, which leaves only a passage for one
vessel at a time. The ships can hardly perceive the
least motion of the winds, the grounds, that surround
it on all sides, heing of so great a height ; hesides,
they approach the shore as near as they please with-
out danger, and the harhour is capable of admitting
vessels even of four hundred ton. The bay is capa-
cious enough to contain a thousand [vessels]. Be-
fore it is the great Bay of St. Anne, covered to the
southeast by the two islands of Ciboux and Cape
Dauphin. , . . The strand of Port Dauphin is of
greater extent than that of any other harbour in the
island ; and notwithstanding that there is plenty of
codfish, yet this is not the only advantage of the
place; the neighbourhood of Labrador [the Bras d'Or
lakes were then called Labrador] and Niganiche [Ingo-
nish] renders it easy for the inhabitants and the sav-
ages to assemble upon necessary occasions.
186
Rnglishtown
"The vessels employed in the fishery at Nij^anirhc
arc obliged hy the king's ordinance to retire to Port
Dauphin toward the fifteenth of August, because of
the storms that rage; in that season. When they
have got into those harbours, they expose the cod-
fish on shore, where nature seems to have made a
bed for that pinpose. Sometimes you sec a hundred
and fifty boats employed in this business."
It seems that the French were for some
time imdecidcd as to wliether the citadel of
Louishurg should l)e built at Port Dauphin
or on " luiglish Harbour," as Louisburg har-
bour was then called. Port Dauphin was
more impregnable but less convenient, and
was finally rejected.
St. Anne Bay is another inlet like those two
long "arms of gold" that give entrance to the
Bras d'Or lakes. It lies nearly parallel with
them, but does not reach more than ten or
twelve miles into the land, because of the
watershed which keeps it from forming an-
other arm to the Bras d'Or lakes.
It was an easy matter to sail from the east-
ern harbours around to St. Anne; und when
there was any fighting going on, St. Anne
seems never to have been left out.
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In 1754 the English came around In one of
their war-ships, a part of Commodore War-
ren's fleet then blockading Louisburg, and
destroyed all the French settlements on St.
Anne's Bay.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century
there was a remarkable influx of Scotch High-
landers to Cape Breton and at the beginning of
the nineteenth century ship-load after ship-load
was landed on that island. It is estimated that
between 1802 and 1828 some 25,000 of these
people poured into Cape Breton. They were
turned out of their homes in Scotland to make
way for sheep-raising, that having been found
more profitable than the rents of the miserable
tenantry. The refugees sought the new high-
lands of a more friendly world, where landlords
were not, and thus St. Anne and the whole of
Cape North came to have its present indus-
trious and temperate population.
On the end of the narrow spit of land that
closes the harbour to the storms and allows only
one ship at a time to pass, a light-house now
stands, and another shines over the sea from
one of the Ciboux Islands.
Englishtown, too, is the proud birthplace of
188
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Eng/ishtown
a great man, for here first saw the light Angus
McCaskell, the giant, concerning whose life we
know only what has been told us by the genial
and learned author of " Baddeck and that Sort
of Thing," who ends his description of the
great man with the exclamation, " Alas ! he has
passed away, leaving little influence except a
good example of growth, and a grave which is
a new promontory on that ragged coast swept
by the winds of the untamed Atit*rtic."
We regret to say we did not visit his grave
nor his shoes nor sit in his chair ; we were so
overcome by the unexpected beauty of bay and
mountain that we forgot all about the storied
dead until it was too late and we had crossed
Torquil McLane's ferry not to return.
We entered Englishtown in the same lei-
surely way we had approached it. It consists
of half a dozen or more houses placed not too
close together along the road, and we were in
search of a "long low house with a black roof
standing on a hillside." Here lived Sandy
McLeod and his family, and here we hoped to
spend the night. Sandy himself was not at
home, nor yet Mrs. Sandy, but bonnie Annie
was. To let us in, she opened the bars that
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closed the gateway to the meadow at the
farther end of which the house stood, and
undertook the offices of hospitality in her
mother's absence. Her mother had gone on
the mountains for blueberries, which was good
news to hungry travellers.
As there was no one at home but Annie and
a little boy, we, with a confidence partly as-
sumed, undertook the deliverance of Dan.
A " collar and hames " is a remarkable in-
vention not commonly used on a single horse
excepting for heavy work, but it formed a part
of our strong harness. The hames is within
the comprehension of the average intellect, for
it unbuckles and comes off, but the collar does
not ; it does not open, and is smaller than the
horse's head by any ordinary method of meas-
urements. We had exhausted mathematics
and the patient Dan's forbearance ; the sunset
flamed and waned unseen before the inspiration
seized us to turn it around, then, presto ! it
was the shape of his head, and off it came.
Dan's tortured ears and head being finally
released, to our infinite relief and his, we min-
istered to his comfort as well as we could in
the gathering darkness, then went to the house,
190
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wn
whence proceeded an appetising odour of cook-
ing clams. This was a sorrowful delusion,
however, as it proceeded from a kettle of " rock-
weed" Annie was boiling for the pigs.
The mother came with a pail of fresh blue-
berries and bade us a cordial welcome, and we
made a hearty supper of bread and milk, and
blueberries sweetened with brown sugar, our
appetites quickened by the day out of doors
and the odour of steaming rockweed.
After a night of such sleep as comes only to
those who have spent the day in the open air,
we wakened to a morning of splendour.
A neighbour "tackled" Dan for us, making
no comments upon the state of his rigging, un-
tangling and putting all to rights and making
our stanch little craft again seaworthy, with the
deftness of a sailor.
This handy son of Neptune also mended
the holes the rope had worn in the feed-bag,
for a fine stream of Dan's precious provender
issued from each of a number of holes at every
motion, and we know not how far we had left
this sign of our passing along the lonely road.
Meantime we talked to the pretty boy who
is heir to the McLeod estate, and learned that
191
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he was six, that he did not go to school,
though he earnestly assured us in the dialect
of Cape North, " If I will be seven, then I
might go," meaning that when he had attained
that mature age he would go.
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XIV
FRENCH RIVER
TORQUIL McLANE'S ferry is the
notable instrument by means of which
the traveller can find his way out of
Englishtown to ^he north.
Englishtown lies opposir he narrowest part
of St. Anne, which here f be about a mile
wide, but that providential tongue of land
must not be forgotten which separates the
inner harbour from the outer bay, leaving only
"a passage for one vessel at a time," and
making of it a safe refuge in time of war.
Although not at present of military impor-
tance, the tongue of land still answers a very
good purpose in shortening the labours of
Torquil, the ferryman, who is a man of note
all over Cape North, and, for that matter,
much farther. For whoever writes an article
or even a letter about this part of the country,
never fails to adorn the same with the pictur-
esque name of Torquil McLane, the English-
town ferryman.
'' 193
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Down North and Up Along
Torquil must be pronounced " turkle," and
Cape Breton on the spot must be called Cape
" Britton." It is supposed by some that the
island got its name from the Basque sailors who
came to these shores from Cape Breton near
Bayonne, in very early times. Be that as it
may, the Basque sailors are no longer there to
see justice done their mother tongue, and Cape
" Britton " it is in the mouths of these former
subjects of the British Empire.
Torquil McLane's ferry was quite as pic-
turesque as Torquil himself, and resembled
nothing so little as our narrow-minded ideas
of a " ferry." To see it was to understand
and sympathise with Mr. A.'s concern that we
should have a horse willing to cross it !
It had no landing whatever other than the
pebbly beach provided by nature. The ferry-
boat resembled a retired dory, grown broad
and flat-bottomed with increase of years. We
reached this promising form of transportation
by pitching down a stony embankment upon
a stony beach.
Torquil was waiting for us, for had he not
seen us enter town the night before, and did
he not hope and trust that we should be cross-
194
French River
e
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ing his ferry In the morning? He was a tall,
spare Highlander, and he surveyed us with his
shrewd Scotch eyes, and in a deep voice in-
quired, after the manner of his people, where
we came from, where we were going, and what
our names were.
We answered and looked at each other in
consternation, for while wc might get aboard
the high-sided boat, rocking in the water, what
of Dan ? Could he and would he do this
thing ? We did not beheve that he could or
would.
While Torquil was taking the horse from the
waggon, his daughter, aged eighteen, strongly
built and rosy-cheeked, appeared upon the
scene. She had come to help her father row
us over the ferry, and was accompanied by a
little boy and a solemn-faced baby.
Torquil and his buxom daughter laid hold
upon the waggon and pulled it out into the
water and aboard the boat, that vehicle going
through the most alarming contortions meaa-
time. Then it was Dan's turn, and we watched
with bated breath as he waded out.
" Get in there ! " said Torquil the ferryman
— and Dan got in ! It was a beautiful sight
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Down North and Up Along
He pawed about with his front feet until he
got them over the side and in the boat, and
repeated the operation with his hind ones
until he was all in. Could he have known the
feelings with which we regarded him upon that
occasion, he would have been a proud and
happy horse.
As it was, he was no sooner in than he wished
himself out again, and it became necessary
for one of us to stand on a seat and keep
him from walking overboard, while Torquil
and his daughter pushed the boat from shore
and turned it toward the other side of the
harbour.
The baby was stowed for safe-keeping under
the seat in the bow, whence it peered out curi-
ous but silent — as became a Scotch baby.
The little boy pulled at his father's oar until
his face was crimson, and the strong-armed
daughter kept stroke with her father. Thus
we passed the perils of the sea.
As soon as the boat grated on the pebbles
of the opposite shore, Dan scrambled over-
board and Torquil harnessed him to the waggon.
"We paid the ferryman his fee and watched the
clumsy craft go back across the mouth of the
196
h'm
*n
French River
harbour bearing the far-famed ferryman, his
strong daughter, his crimson-faced son, and his
silent baby.
This long narrow reef is a curious object
which, seen at a distance, looks more like an
artificial breakwater than a work of nature. It
is formed of large light-coloured cobblestones,
and the road over them was almost invisible, so
slight is the impression made upon them by
wheels and footsteps. Quantities of gulls flew
screaming about us, and upon the bar strange-
looking conifers spread themselves out. Broad
at the base, they were only three or four feet
high, grotesque caricatures of the elegantly
proportioned spruces and firs of the moun-
tains. Luxuriant patches of Herb Robert
with red-tinged leaves and deep pink blossoms
brightened the austere bar, and the Mertensia
Maritima was also in bloom, though Wve saw but
one plant of it. It is as scarce as it is charm-
ing and loves to adorn just such stony places.
Unfortunately for it, its pretty patches of blue-
gray leaves set on long stems radiating from
a centre are very noticeable among the stones,
even if it were not for the showy flowers, rose-
red in the bud, violet as they unfold, and finally
197
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when fully open a deep pure blue, and they
fall victims to the passer-by.
We are distressed to recall that we took this
last plant, it may be thereby exterminating the
race, so far as that particular cobblestone bar
is concerned. Upon realising this, we wished
it back in its place among the stones, ripening
its seeds. But it was too late. The delicate
roots could not be returned to the crevices
whence they had been torn, and we regarded
the quaint and pretty blossoms that lay before
us with a feeling of guilt which it is to be
hoped is the fate of all vandals.
Patches of fragrant juniper covered with
clusters of dusky blue berries were scattered
over the bar, and the yellow August flower
nodded merrily to us from its hard lot among
the stones.
The August flower, as it is here called, grows
all over Nova Scotia. It is a yellow composite,
smaller and more delicate than a dandelion, and
the most joyous of weeds, standing anywhere
and everywhere that it can find room for a seed
to sprout, and making the roadsides and stony
places bright.
Once over the bar, the road lay along the
198
French River
narrow stretch of level country between moun-
tains and sea. The houses by common con-
sent in this whole country keep as far away
from the road and from one another as they
can. We could see them set far back toward
the mountains and protected from the dangers
of the highway by broad fields which lay in
front of them.
For some distance the road winds Its charm-
ing way in full view of the surrounding moun-
tains and sea, and then it turns inland and
crosses the steep-banked Barasois River over a
new iron bridge.
Cape Breton is a remarkable place for brooks.
One feels obliged to keep on saying so, for
they keep on appearing, the most friendly and
joyous brooks ; sliding without a ripple over
mossy rocks, leaping wildly down the faces of
cliffs, disappearing, reappearing, murmuring,
smiling, roaring, they were our constant com-
panions, delightful beyond all reason. They are
brown brooks as a rule, a deep golden brown,
though sometimes they are emerald green-.
Indian Brook, which we crossed soon after
the Barasois, almost anywhere else would be
called a river. It has a broad stony beach
199
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WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580
(716) 872-4503
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her, and with glowing eyes she — landed a
smelt.
The gods play strange pranks with us poor
mortals, and never did they play a stranger
than when they converted M. into the most
inveterate disciple of Izaak Walton through
the medium of one wretched little salt-water
smelt.
In this case, catching the fish had the very
agreeable sequence of cooking them out of
doors and eating them.
Our gypsy dinners cooked at noon by the
wayside were the one substantial meal of the
day, breakfast and supper consisting of oat-
meal porridge, sometimes without milk, and
toasted bread, sour, as a rule, though if we
asked for them, we could generally get an egg
and some salt fish.
But those midday meals ! the flavour of them,
with the aroma of the wood-fire clinging about
the viands, and the hunger that waited upon
them ! Even to think of them at this late day
is enough to quicken the appetite.
Up to this time we had found that the
canned or smoked meat of our native land
with the addition of ship biscuit, milk from a
240
Ingonish
wayside cottage, and a penny's worth of Cape
Breton potatoes capable of being prepared in
many appetising ways completely satisfied us ;
but now all was changed. We entered upon
an era of camp cooking that revolutionised
our previous habits and converted us for all
time to come into exacting epicures.
On the stones by a brook-side we cooked
and ate the result of our first day's fishing, —
smelts, and a few small bass. Smelts are more
delicate in flavour than bass, and they possess
the great advantage of being without scales.
The scaHng of a small bass is infinitely more
entertaining to the onlooker than to the opera-
tor. The slippery little thing has to be held
by its slippery little tail while one scrapes
against the scales, and consequently the ex-
asperating object is flying through the air most
of the time.
The doctor did not spend much time fish-
ing off the wharf, as certain large brook trout
in his tent testified. He had preserved the
largest and displayed their dried forms with
exceeding great pride. He explained to us his
way of curing them and considered a pound
and a half a good size for a trout, though the
i6 241
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Down North and Up Along
best of those on his table had weighed twice and
three times that much before they were cured,
so he said. He thought it a great pity that
trout shrink up and lose weight so when cured.
He had caught endless dozens of trout, the
smaller of which he had sent to distant friends,
but the largest he could not part with and kept
their smoked and shining forms spread out on
his table.
From this time forth our peace of mind was
gone ; we were the victims of the " gentle art
of angling," and looked at the rushing brooks
not so much to admire as to wonder about the
speckled trout hiding in their pools.
There are two Ingonishes. They are both
accented on the last syllable, and are separated
from each other by a long neck of land known
as Middlehead.
This neck cuts the broad bay, that would
otherwise exist, in two, and forms the lovely
South Bay and the almost equally charming
North Bay. To go from one to the other, a
distance of about eight miles, the road passes
across the mainland end of the neck, and one
loses sight of the water, though never far from
it.
242
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Ingonish
Two miles from South Ingonish on the road
to the north, one crosses a bridge, and just the
other side of it an obscure track turns off to
the left. It is stony and rough, and in one
place rather alarmingly steep, but it passes
along a valley, mountain-guarded and traversed
by a brook. After following the track two or
three miles, the brook is found quite close to it,
and one comes almost under the great cliff of
rock known as Franey's chimney. This ap-
pears to have been split from the mountain
wall behind it, and stands forth a massive, frown-
ing form as though on guard over the wild
glen and the rugged cliffs of the mountains
about.
It is a wild place down there under Franey's
chimney, a lonely place where one would not
be surprised to see antlers or the clumsy form
of the bear that we knew frequented these
mountains.
Here we camped, — that is, we gave Dan a
limited freedom, — unpacked the fishing-rod,
which had suddenly become an object of vital
interest in our eyes, and took our way across a
stretch of meadow to the brook-side. We
soon came upon a series of dark pools close to
243
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Down North and Up Along
the shore, and with little expectation of draw-
ing forth anything so " said and sung " about
as a speckled trout, with our unskilled hands,
we hardened our hearts and strung upon the
hook a large angleworm, distinguished by a
magnificent wriggle, condoning the offence by
the reflection that according to the latest word
of science upon the nervous system of the
worm, it does not really suffer when thus mis-
used. This we seductively dropped into a
pool, with no real expectation, for there have
been many books writ upon trout-fishing, and
we supposed that only an artificial fly of strange
construction, thrown with secret and consum-
mate skill, could land one of these famous
creatures. And we knew ourselves for simple
folk with no wiles but such as could be offered
by a plain angleworm, a live one at that, with
not an artificial hair on its head.
Still, no sooner had our plebeian worm
entered the dark pool than there came a thrill-
ing twitch to the line, and we flun^ upon the
bank as pretty a red and gold speckled trout
as one could ask to see, thereby dispelling for
ever the almost religious mystery that had here-
tofore enveloped trout-fishing in our minds.
244
ong
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Catching Trout for Dixner
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Ingonish
We then and there made the important dis-
covery that, notwithstanding the glamour of
romance in which the books have enveloped
them, brook trout are mere fish, after all. They
swallow a worm with a hook inside just as the
" sunfish " in the mill-pond of our childhood
used to swallow a bent pin under the same
circumstances. We afterward wished we had
tried a bent pin on the trout, to complete the
confusion of those writers who have for so
long a time been imposing on a too credu-
lous public.
These thoughts did not trouble us at the
moment, however, for, after all, there is a magi-
cal fascination in a brook trout, which can no
more be resisted than it can be explained.
Probably no trout is ever half so beautiful as
the first one caught. Our acquaintance with
them heretofore had been in picture-books,
or nicely browned on the table, but here lay a
live one in the green grass, all speckled and
coloured like a rainbow, and no wonder great
Franey leaned out of the sky to see.
There was but one rod, and two ot us, and
we took turns and agonised between, knowing
so well we could get the proverbial big one out
245
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of the pool, if it had only happened to be our
turn. But when our turn came, we never got
the big one. We caught any number of small
ones, however, and lost more than we caught,
for they had a way of jumping off the hook in
mid-air and falling back into the water with a
shake and a flirt. The largest ones invariably
did this, and did it with such apparent intention
and malice that we began to think there might
be something in the books, after all.
They were so pretty we hated to cook them ;
some were dark in colour with deep-coloured
spots ; and some were golden-brown, almost
as though saturated with light, with lighter
and brighter spots, and these were the prettiest.
We did cook them ; and what could be daintier
or more delicious than the snowy-white or
salmon-pink morsels that came out of the
frying-pan ? We ate all we caught, and would
not like to say how many that was.
Nor did this end the adventures of that day
under Franey. While resting after our delect-
able dinner and the exciting events of the morn-
ing, we saw a small party of men and boys
advancing down the glen. They were burdened
with something they bore upon poles resting on
246
Ingonish
their shoulders, and we went to see what it was.
What was our surprise to find the skins and
flesh of two bears which they had just killed
on the back or* the mountain beneath which we
were resting. They were young bears, and
had been feeding for many days on the blue-
berries that cover the mountains ; they were
very fat and their flesh was good, and one of
the men cut us a piece from a hind-quarter.
This was the first fresh meat we had seen since
leaving Baddeck, and we took it, though not
without misgivings. It seemed too bad to
have killed the little bears playing among the
blueberries on the mountain-top ; and then
one hesitates to eat the flesh of a creature that
can be taught to walk upright, and even to
dance. Still, there was another side to it, and
we no doubt had reason to be thankful that
the bears had not taken a notion to hunt us,
while the men on the mountains were hunting
them. To an unprejudiced mind it is as fair
for people to eat bears as for bears to eat peo-
ple, the only question being which can catch
the other.
So we took the bear-meat and also a pail of
the blueberries the men had picked, for they
247
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Down North and Up A long
had got not only the hears but the berries the
bears had wanted to get. They were enor-
mous blueberries ; we never saw so large be-
fore nor since, and they were sweet and juicy.
The bears know what they are about when
they go to the mountains for blueberries.
We entered North Ingonish, as we had en-
tered South Ingonish, toward the end of the
afternoon. Its bay is more open to the sea,
and has not the inner harbour of the South
Bay. The mountains are about it, more dis-
tant, but still lovely, and before it lies a beach
of exceeding beauty and grandeur. It sweeps
in a long and beautiful curve half-way around
the bay, lines of splendid breakers rolling in.
It is a wide beach of fine sand and slopes
gently to the sea, where the snowy breakers
repeat the exquisite curve of the shore.
North Ingonish is very beautiful, though
quite different from South Ingonish. Its more
distant mountains were lovely in the evening
light in which we first saw them and its circling
beach and wide bay. Smoky was visible,
though softened by the distance, as was also
the contour of the surrounding headlands.
We were not prepared for the astonishing
248
Ingonish
beauty of the Ingonishes, nor did it seem pos-
sible they could lie there so lonely in their
loveliness, unvisited by pleasure-seeking man.
The Ingonish people are fishermen, and are
principally Irish and Scotch Catholics. Like
Englishtown the place was known long ago,
and was at one time a flourishing French fish-
ing settlement, but war required victims, and
the men of Ingonish were drawn away to fight
instead of fish, and the place, like St. Anne, was
finally wrested from the French by the English
of Commodore Warren's fleet.
Traces of the period of French prosperity
are said still to exist, though we did not know
about them at the time, and no one volun-
teered information concerning the relics of the
past. It seems that a large church was built
here, and in 1 849 a bell weighing not less than
two hundred pounds was dug out of the sand
of the beach. It bore a French inscription
and was marked St. Malo, 1729, and was said
to have had a remarkably clear tone which
must have been heard far out to sea. It was
carried away to Sydney, which the people of
Ingonish never should have allowed.
In 1740, the records tell us, Ingonish was
249
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Down North and Up ytlong
the second town of Cape Breton, and its fleet
caught 1^,560 quintals of fisli. This is tliat
Niganiche where the French in olden time
went a-fishing, anil wliere a {)aternal govern-
ment ordered them away to the safe harbour
of Port Dauphin, as St. Anne was called, after
the fifteenth of August.
" From Port Dauphin we arrived at Niga-
niche," says Pinchon, *' which \^ only a road,
where the vessels are far from being safe ; but
there is great plenty of codfish. Yet as it
must be deserted at a certain season, and the
country thereabouts is quite barren, tiiere are
hardly any dwellings upon the place. Even
those few inhabitants are obliged to fetch their
wood for firing from Port Daujihin."
Ingonish may well have discourjiged a
people obliged to live on what they found
there. But the day will come when its beauty
will bring it a larger revenue than its codfish
ever have brought or ever will bring.
The highlands back of Ingonish used to be
noted for the large game found there. Caribou
and moose are said to have once existed in
almost incredible numbers. But this is not a
pleasant topic, for the deer were slaughtered
250
Ingonish
in the most ruthless manner because their hides
brought the sum of ten shillings each ; and
what mattered the extermination of the noblest
animals of the country compared to ten shill-
ings in a man's pocket?
We are told that in 1729 over nine thou-
saml moose were killed for their skins alone,
and that for many years this wholesale slaughter
was kept up unciicckcd. So great was the
stench from the decaying bodies that sailors
knew by that alone when they were approach-
ing the north shore of Cape Breton.
It is needless to comment upon the result.
All too late a body of troops was stationed at
Ingonish to protect the moose, but there were
few left to need protection, and since then the
unequal contest has gone on, Indians and
sportsmen combining to destroy the noble
animal, until now it and the caribou are almost
exterminated in the highlands about Ingonish.
We saw no quails in our travels, for w; were
a little too far north for them, but the Canada
or spruce grouse in small companies ran along
the road in front of the horse exhibiting very
little fear.
Ingonish is not wholly inaccessible, nor is
251
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North Ingonish devoid of comforts for the
visitor.
A small steamboat, the " Harlow," runs from
Halifax to Newfoundland, stopping at Bad-
deck, Englishtown, South and North Ingonish,
and north of these places at Aspy Bay and
Bay St. Lawrence.
The " Harlow " carries a siren which once
was the cause of great consternation along this
lovely coast, for the boat and her siren came
without warning, and the people one night were
terrified by a wild and awful yell as of some
frightful demon rushing in from the sea. They
are said to have fled inland and remained in
the forest trembling through the night, until
daylight gave them courage to creep forth and
question the source of the frightful noise.
Unexpectedly to hear the " Harlow's" siren
along that lonely shore might well cause a thrill
to any nerves.
At Ingonish Is the first public-house after
leaving Paddeck, — a pleasant place on a beau-
tiful site, with sea and mountains before the
door, and very well kept.
This house is approached through a lane
bordered by fish-flakes of a size intermediate
352
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onts.
between those of Digby and French River,
and upon them were drying the everlasting cod.
The family, too, keeps the store, that opens on
the lane, and doubtless the post-office is there,
for the postman drives in his two-wheeled cart
from Baddeck up along when the weather is
fit, but in winter he carries his budget on a
sledge drawn by dogs.
There are wharves for the fishing-boats at
North Ingonish ; and these, with the boats
lying about, give it a pleasing touch of the
picturesque.
Ingonish is the end of the tourists* explora-
tions as a rule. Few find their way thither,
still fewer go north of there ; and as we looked
toward the mysterious and yet distant Cape
North, we had the pleasurable feeling that it at
least was all our own.
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1*1
XVII
THE HALF WAY HOUSE
FROM Ingonish to Asp/ Bay is a
frightful country, almost uninhabited,
excepting for the settlement of Neils
Harbour, which lies on the rocky
coast a mile from the Half Way House.
The Half Way House is eighteen miles
from Ingonish and was put in the wilderness
by the government for the succour of those
obliged to pass that way, for it is said that
formerly people perished on the mountains or
in the swamps. In bad weather it must be
very difficult to cross that country ; and the
Half Way House with its warmth and good
cheer n uFt be a welcome sight to the weary
and half-frozen traveller.
Climbing the hill out of Ingonish, we looked
constantly back at the beautiful and unfolding
views. The road was so stony and weather-
worn that part of the time we preferred to
walk, and Dan preferred that we should. We
came to an occasional lonely starved little
254
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T^ie Half Way House
farm, where the women with their kerchiefs
and gleaming sickles were at work in the yel-
low barley patches. We stopped each time to
pass a word and see their faces lighten, as we
told them Parson Gibbons had sent us to see
their country and had sent messages to them.
They all asked eagerly when he was coming
back.
We crossed a bridge and turned into the
bushes to let a waggon pass. Instead of pass-
ing, it stopped in a friendly way while we told
our names, where we came from, and whither
we were going. It contained Mrs. Morri-
son of Green Cove and Mr. Timmons, and
they were on their way to Mrs. Timmons's
mother's, for we, too, had learned to be polite
and ask questions.
Soon there were no more barley patches and
the road dwindled .o a mere track where the
horse waded up to his middle in grass, ever-
lasting, and golden-rod, and finally plunged
into the dismal swamp that crosses the country
here. We laboured for several miles through
as desolate a region as one need care to
know. It was for the most part an alder-
choked swampj the road cut through a solid
255
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wall of gloomy green, the wheels oftentimes
hub-deep in mud, while stones in the ruts
constantly canted the waggon to one side or
the other. This sort of enjoyment was diver-
sified by more open places where mud and
stones gave place to all stones, and where were
sepulchral reaches of dead trees, their branches
all fallen away, and the trunks and limbs shin-
ing ghostly white. From time to time we
caught glimpses of stony and barren high-
lands, only cu plunge hopelessly into alders
and mud again. We named this charming
road the Melancholy Way of the Alders, and
whoever passes that way will agree that it
deserves its name.
We met no one, and so we shall never know
what would have happened if we had, in that
narrow alley where one could scarcely have
pulled out of the deep ruts even if there had
been any place to pull to.
Many stories are told of this swamp ; one
is that whoever steps into it cannot step out
again until the next day. We also heard of
the traveller who, passing the gloomy road one
summer night, saw a light in the swamp, and
upon stopping and shouting elicited the infor-
256
M
i
The Half Way House
■'- — - ■ -. ^
mation that it proceeded from the pipe of an
old woman who, having inadvertently stepped
in and knowing the legend, was philosophically
biding her time and making the best of a bad
matter by solacing the dreary hours with her
pipe until daylight should come to break the
spell and set her free.
This recalled another story that shows how
good a thing superstition is in other people,
if one only knows how to make use of it. It
is said the Highlanders of Cape North have
more or less faith in bogies and a correspond-
ing fear of them. Somewhere along the coast
is a rocky seat known as the devil's chair, and
a strange light was frequently seen here at
night, to the blood-curdling horror of the
beholder.
The same traveller, who was not a High-
lander, and who had no fear of bogies, one
night shied a stone, all too well aimed, which
extinguished the light and raised a frightened
howl from the bogy, who doubtless thought
all bogy-land was after her in earnest, for the
pseudo-bogy was a poor old woman too old
to work with any sort of satisfaction to her-
self, and whose son, being a hard man, com-
17 257
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Down North and Up Along
pelled her to work for his satisfaction. So
she found it convenient to become bedridden,
thus shifting the responsibility of work to
younger shoulders, and was only able to walk
at night, when undetected she would steal
forth and seat herself in the devil's chair for
the comfort of a pipe. Her discoverer prom-
ised not to betray her, gave her a new pipe
and a supply of tobacco, and it is to be hoped
her hard son will never read these lines, at
least not until the poor old soul has gone
where she cannot be called forth to work at
the bidding of any man.
We floundered slowly along through the
Melancholy Way of the Alders, cheering each
other with ghost stories, and about noon came
out of it, and crossed the bridge over Black
Brook ; of all the streams we had seen the most
forbidding, fascinating, and rock-bound. It was
far, far below us and made its way between mas-
sive and broken walls of rock. Trees closely
bordered the rocks above and clung in the
crevices, overleaning and shadowing the chasm
below. Altogether, it was a sinister-looking
brook and as black as night.
But we had a sudden inner vision of trout
?58
kli
h
The Half Way House
P—— ^ll" !■ ■■ ■■.■—■ I ■■■ I. II i ■ ■_ — -II — ■! I I II ■>■——§
in its pools ! Close to the pools at one side
lay a flat table of rock, where one could stand
or sit at ease, if once it could be reached. The
sun shone brightly, and it was the wrong time
of day for trout, as well as being too late in the
season, yet there was an irresistible fascination
in those black pools. If the trout were not
there, where were they ?
By clinging to the roots of trees and pro-
ceeding with caution, we were able to scale
the rocks and reach the flat rock by the pools.
We congratulated ourselves upon the posses-
sion of worms, for they certainly v/ere a more
natural food for fish than " flies " made of all
sorts of indigestible things, and no doubt Cape
Breton trout had not been educated up to
" flies." So we cast a worm, but it had no
time to enter the water, for even as it touched
the surface it was caught by a trout and swal-
lowed, hook and all. With pride unspeakable
we pulled him in, struggling so that we trembled
for the rod and line, for we knew not how
to " land " a fish other than just to pull him
out of the water with as few preliminaries as
possible.
We put him in a damp cavern in the rock
259
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Down North and Up Along
behind us, and tried again. The result was
the same, except that we lost the fish. We
now knew that the despised " fly " was the
scientific bait for this variety of trout, and be-
gan to long for one, a multi-coloured creature
not born from an egg, made of strong things
that could not be swallowed nor torn off, and
in whose care the hook would not come un-
baited. In short, down there on the flat rock
before the trout pools of Black Brook, we
wished to be delivered from the ignominy of
angleworms. The truth is, we were fly-
fishing with worms, and our newborn fisher-
man's pride rebelled. As fast as we threw, the
fish jumped at the hook ; they scarcely seemed
to know whether it was baited or not, and the
smallest remnant of worm answered as well as
the plumpest morsel. They were not as large
as those on the show table in the doctor's tent,
but they were large enough ; we could not have
secured them had they been any larger; we
could not as it was, and lost a great many
more than we caught. It was very stimulating
down there surrounded by the great rocks,
with the black water rushing swiftly down-
stream, and the still pools lying in the shadow
260
?t , I .
The Half JFay House
-■
of the rocks, while at every cast of the line
the gorgeous dark-skinned trout with their
flashing jewel-spots leaped at the hook and
either came fluttering wildly to our hand, or
to our equal regret and pleasure freed them-
selves in mid-air and fell flashing back into
the water.
It was long before we could tear ourselves
away from the spot ; then we climbed the diffi-
cult cliff, and journeyed on to another deep-
down brook near which was an open grassy
space fit to camp in. Dan was given his oats,
and we took the long rope that had tied the
bag to the back of the waggon and let our tin
pail down over the rail of the bridge to the far-
away stream of sparkling cold water. Such
water as comes down these brooks, sweet, cold,
clear, full of sparkle, it seems almost living,
and seems, too, to give life to him who drinks.
We took a long, refreshing draught, and then
prepared our meal of fresh-caught trout, blue-
berries we had ourselves picked from the
mountains, and bear's meat. We were agree-
ably disappointed in this meat ; it was delicate
in flavour, and when cooked until tender, for it
was somewhat tough, was as good as any meat.
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Being tough, it was better stewed than broiled
and we still think with longing of the bear's
meat stews we concocted under the fir-trees of
Cape Breton with the aid of the sparkling
brook water and the red-skinned potatoes M.
bought each day from a wayside cottage.
While we were preparing our Black Brook
trout, along came a Highlander leading a cow,
and he stopped, full of curiosity. We showed
him our fish and he said they did very well,
that Black Brook was the place for trout, but
that he had caught one measuring twenty-two
inches. Then he took the rod and handled it
curiously, particularly the reel. " This," he
said, tapping it, " I suppose will be a reel. I
have lived a good many years, but I never saw
one and never expected to ; " and he unwound
the line and wound it up again. All this
time the cow was tossing her head and trying
to pull away, but he clung to the rope and
the rod, from time to time requesting the cow
to " sh ! " At length he and the cow went
on their way, no doubt with much food for
meditation.
It was as usual nearing the twilight hour
when we drew near our destination. Breaking
262
ti
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ong^
broiled
e bear's
trees of
Darkling
oes M.
; Brook
T a cow,
showed
;ry well,
out, but
;nty-two
ndled it
his," he
reel. I
ver saw
nwound
\.ll this
trying
)pe and
the cow
w went
Dod for
It hour
reaking
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through the woods at last, we came upon the
Half Way House standing on an open high
place.
The Half Way House is just what such a
refuge should be, warm, clean, and hospitable.
The door opens into a large kitchen with a
generous stove on one side and a floor that
shines from much scrubbing. The McPher-
sons keep the place and have for many a year,
though Mrs. McPherson is still bonnie and
charming.
Mr. McPherson was away at the time of our
visit, on his yearly trip to Halifax, to lay in
provisions for the winter, of which forethought
there is certainly need.
Besides Mrs. McPherson, a tall Highlander
who looked after Dan's comfort, and a young
woman who helped about the house, we were
the only beings in that distant and lonely spot,
excepting a white dog with a black head and a
tortoise-shell cat with a tortoise-shell kitten,
which she constantly licked and which afflicted
her motherly heart by frequently flying ofl^ to
an enclosure where the cows came at night, and
racing around the top rail out of reach of the
maternal tongue.
263
«]«>
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Down North and Up Along
The Half Way House stands on the cleared
brow of a high hill with somewhat sombre
though rather pleasing views of denuded high-
lands and interminable reaches of spruce, fir, and
hemlock on three sides ; while the fourth side,
toward which the house faces, overlooks the sea,
whose surf is heard pounding against the rocks
a mile away. Down there on the rocks by the
sea can also be seen one corner of Neils Har-
bour. For here, in the loneliest and most
dangerous part of that lonely and dangerous
coast, lies the little settlement of English
people who were the peculiar care of their
devoted friend. Parson Gibbons. For these
people came from Newfoundland, and are not,
like most of the settlers of Cape Breton, High-
land Scotch.
We found the air of this northern coast
splendidly exhilarating. Although it was now
well along in September and the air was spark-
ling with cold, particularly in the early morning,
we never felt chilly. Its effect was to make
the blood flow faster, and there was none of the
sense of chill and depression one so often feels
after driving for several hours in the same
temperature in southern New England. The
264
fl
The Half W^ay House
air of "Cape North" is alone worth going
there for.
Mrs. McPherson cooked eggs and salt fish
and potatoes for our supper and spread the
table in the sunny little sitting-room that
opened out of the kitchen and whose floor was
carpeted with many rugs of agreeable design.
We persuaded her to join us, and added blue-
berries, apples, and coffee from our stores.
Mrs. McPherson gave us our first lesson in
Gaelic, and from her we learned to say " good-
night" and to ask for bread, milk, potatoes, and
oats in that unmusical tongue.
She also initiated us into the mysteries of rug-
making, and told us how dogwood bark makes
a gray colouring ; " crackle," which is, as far as
we could make out, a kind of moss, yields
brown ; while hemlock also makes a pretty
shade of brown ; and a weed which we could
not make out at all from her description yields
a yellow dye. We were glad to know these
things, and to examine the charming rugs on
the floor, made from old rags dyed so pleas-
antly by the juices of the grim forest, and to
learn the individual history of each one.
In the evening came a crowd of berry-pickers
265
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Down North and Up Along
with full buckets. They were young men and
girls who had been out on the mountains to
the blueberry barrens which are famous about
here. It seemed to be a sort of annual picnic
which lasted two or three days, they coming at
sunset to the Half Way House and at sunrise
going forth to the mountains.
They took supper at a long table in the
kitchen, and we were sorry to see they did
not fare as well as we, for they had only the
never-failing tea and toast, rather an insufficient
meal, one should think, after a long c.^ on the
mountains. But the bread at the Half Way
House is at least not sour, and tea and toast is
the fare to which they are accustomed, and
which they would have had in their own homes
no matter how hard the labour of the day.
The berry-pickers talked Gaelic at table,
and after tea the girls kept silent or whispered
to one another, while the men smoked their
pipes and talked to one another — always in
Gaelic. As they sat ranged along the sides of
the kitchen on benches and chairs, they strongly
recalled the poor whites or " Crackers " of the
far South. They had the same starved-looking
bodies, and no doubt opposite severities of
266
W
The Half Way House
climate and the same lack of proper nourish-
ment had produced the same result. They
went to bed in the attic, where the men slept
on the floor, but the girls stowed themselves
in a small room wherein was a wide bed.
Early in the morning we were wakened by
the berry-pickers getting up. We wished we
could understand their speech and know what
it was they talked to one another about. What
is there to talk about, we should like to know,
where there is no daily paper, no fashions, no
new books, nor opera ? How can they even
get material enough to make gossip about
their neighbours ?
The road to Neils Harbour is stony and
downhill and there is not much to be seen
from it. One of Cape North's never-failing
brooks breaks through the mountains and
tumbles into the harbour along the course of
the road, though it is for the most part con-
cealed by intervening vegetation. The harbour
is but a little cove jutting into the land and
making a summer haven for the fishing-fleet,
but in winter it is packed full of ice, as is every
cranny of this northern coast. It was over the
ice of this harbour and around the ice of the
267
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Down North and Up Along
cruel shore from Ingonish to the harbour that
Parson Gibbons crept on hands and knees when
the road was totally impassable, one memorable
Christmas day of long ago, and all to bring the
cheer of his presence to the fisher-folk of
Neils Harbour. Perhaps he feared that unless
the Christmas-tide could light up the world
for them a little, they would not have cour-
age to live through the winter, and one won-
ders how they do manage it. It is so remote
and forbidding in summer that one shudders
to imagine what it must be through the long
icy winter.
Yet it is, perhaps, the most picturesque
settlement on the whole coast. There is a
narrow space of lowland near the water, with a
hill rising sharply behind it.
A point of land ending in a bluff on the sea-
side holds back the waves and forms a cove
suited to the needs of the fishing-boats ; and
around the shore of this cove is a picturesque
jumble of low fish-huts, flakes, boats in all
stages of decomposition as well as those in full
vigour of usefulness, tar, chains, evidences of
fish everywhere. The high grass-grown bluff
that abuts out into the water beyond all this, is
268
f
The Half Way House
^ ,, — ■ ■ — ..■■■ — „
covered as well by many rows offtakes, and from
it a fine view of the wild coast is obtainable.
The dwelling-houses of Neils Harbour were
miserable shanties, many of them more like
temporary shelters than permanent homes.
Most of them stood on the hillside, and the
upper ones were reached by a path through the
dooryards of those lower down. Poor and
mean as they were outside, they were yet worse
inside. The rooms were painfully bare, even
the hitherto never-failing rugs being absent in
most of them. Compared to them, the simple
cottages of the Highlanders seemed abodes of
luxury. The people are so desperately poor
because there is no farming land at all, and
there is no work obtainable but the very un-
certain labour of fishing in the sea. They get
very little for the fish they catch, not even as
much as they are worth, we were told; for
here, as elsewhere in remote country places,
the wealth of the people flows into the coffers
of the local storekeeper. He sets his own
price on what they bring him and too fre-
quently pays in merchandise of his own im-
portation, so that often the poor fisher-folk
receive no money at all for their labour.
269
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Down North and Up Along
The "wood for firing" in this bleak camp
is brought from the mountains on sledges
drawn by dogs.
It was a lowering day, with clouds settling
and a cold wind blowing, when we visited Neils
Harbour, and no doubt this is its characteristic
and predominating aspect.
The coast is frightful to look upon, with its
breastwork of sea-worn rock. We had not
known how cruel a rock-bound coast could be
until we saw those sinister and threatening
forms. A vessel forced near shore by stress
of weather would be broken like a toy. Al-
most within hand-reach of the land men's lives
have been dashed out and no aid possible.
On this wild and sullen coast, on a great
rock looking over the leaden sea to the north,
we suddenly came upon Mr. Gibbons's little
brown church standing there, an invitation and
a promise. Following the track that went past
the church, the road came down so close to
the frightful rocks that we were almost upon
them.
Beyond Neils Harbour there is an almost
impassable road to New Haven farther along
the coast. We did not attempt to go there, as
270
long
ak camp
. sledges
s settling
ted Neils
racteristic
1, with its
: had not
: could be
lireatening
by stress
toy. Al-
iens lives
ssible.
)n a great
the north,
ons's little
itation and
t went past
o close to
most upon
an almost
ther along
leo there, as
The Half Way House
we could see the place from where we were, -—
a few houses scattered on the shore that sug-
gested anything but a haven.
It must be a cold and dangerous port for
the poor mariners of life who have found their
way there. Its pitiful old name of Hungry
Cove no doubt better expresses the facts of
life there than the better-sounding New
Haven.
But the people here, in spite of their fright-
ful poverty, have a frank and pleasant manner
very different from the impenetrable and silent
demeanour of the Scotch. We met a little boy
and girl gathering bits of wood by the roadside,
pretty, fragile creatures ; and when we spoke to
them they answered promptly and intelligently,
and with a pretty eagerness to tell us what we
wanted to know.
We spoke to the people we met, and it was
pathetic as well as beautiful to see the worn
faces lighten at the messages we bore from
their beloved pastor.
One woman, upon hearing we had recently
seen Mr. Gibbons, came running from her
house with the tears raining down her face,
blessing him at every step and begging us to
271
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Down North and Up Along
tell him that her husband had finally become
totally blind. She was not begging for sym-
pathy nor asking for alms. All she wanted
was to speak to us and receive a sympathetic
touch of the hand. These people, seeing no
one, expect nothing but the inexorable working
out of thei. lives by such means as lie about
them. We found that this woman and her
husband had only what she could earn by the
labour of her hands, and what that was can be
imagined when one considers the impossibility
of getting a living here even by the hard work
of men's hands. We astonished her by a gift
which though small must have seemed to her
like succour dropped from the skies, and we
went back to the Half Way House filled with
a sense of the misery and courage of the people
of Neils Harbour. We had there seen more
smiles, more cheerfulness and cordiality, than
anywhere else in our journey through Cape
North.
It is a question of race temperament, and
the subject is a very wonderful one when one
stops to consider it.
373
I
XVIII
ASPY BAY
THE road to the north of the Half
Way House continues through the
wilderness. We found it very rough,
and there were no views to beguile
the way other than endless woods of evergreens
spread over the mountains, dismal swamps,
and stony hills where ruts were deep and
pitch holes were many.
In this wilderness we passed two men in a
waggon. They drew into the bushes to give
us way, and we saw in their faces a desire to
ask us our names, where we came from, and
where we were going, so we stopped and an-
swered. One of the men then forced upon
our acceptance three or four small and very
hard apples of which he was proud, because
they came from his own tree.
In the midst of this frightful wilderness we
found a French settlement of three or four
houses.
Why it was there among dead trees, let who
can, answer. The miserable shanties and their
'^ 273
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Down North and Up Along
surroundings were squalid and unsightly, with-
out a touch of picturesqueness. We found a
woman there, a gaunt woman who talked her
French patois with the vivacity of her race.
She was the mother of little children, one ^
young babe. It certainly looked as if the
family would have to subsist upon stones
during the winter. And yet she talked with
vivacity. That is what it is to be French.
These people, we learned later, were descend-
ants of the Acadians. They themselves did
not know it, nor how they came to be among
English-speaking people. They had lost all
tradition of themselves. They only knew that
they had just come from islands in the north,
where life was too hard even for them, be-
cause there was no wood there.
As we went on, it looked as though all the
beauty had been left behind. Ahead of us lay
a straight blue wall, of which we at times
caught glimpses. It appeared to cut off the
way to the north ; it rose up ever and anon
menacing and mysterious. Did we pass be-
yond it } And what then ? What was there
to be seen in this unpeopled and ever increas-
ingly dreary wilderness?
274
i\
stones
1 with
li.
scend-
es did
among
ost all
;w that
north,
m, be-
all the
us lay
times
bff the
anon
ss be-
there
creas-
Aspy Bay
As on the road to the Half Way House, we
travelled miles without seeing a human habi-
tation. But finally there came a change.
Barley fields and patches of oats began to
appear. Houses stood discreetly back from
the road with intervening meadow before the
doors. The flat wall ahead broke up, and we
now and again caught glimpses of a fairy world
that astonished and delighted us. Mr. Gib-
bons had assured us that the farther north we
went, the finer would be the scenery, but the
long and dreary way from Ingonish had dimmed
our hope a little.
Meadows appeared now at the right and
now at the left ; there came a gleam of blue
water and a pretty lake spread out below
us. Two or three houses stood near the
lake, but we could discover no track that led
to them.
In our turnings there came repeatedly the
most bewitching glimpses of mountains, loftier
than those of Ingonish, and about them were
driving wraiths of mist, that filled the hollows
and half obscured the projecting masses.
We crossed streams bordered by cultivated
fields, and the trees began to look home-like,
275
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Down North and Up ylloft[r
ii\rtpIcH anil ImicIics ftcqucntly rtppcai-ing. We
skittcil a valley that once hail been a water-
course ; a torrent had Rwcpt down it and left
l>chind a plain story of its existence. Out of
the middle of the valley rose an island, tree-
covered and with precipitous cliffs of white
pypsum, worn into queer-shaped towers and
hutttx^sses. Over our road also loomed ghostly
and threatening forms of gypsum, under which
we were half afraid to pass, they looked so
ready to topple on oui* heads. And tlicn we
came fairly upon the charmifig valley of Aspy
Bay. It was like joy after sorrow to come
out of the sotnbre fir-Hllcd wilderness into this
blooming valley, through which flowed a broad
and beautiful river. There were elm -trees
singly, and in groups, with the sun behind
them shining out of a misty atmosphere that
made the trees look half unreal, as though
they were a product of the light.
Mountains rose from across the valley in
beautiful slopes, clad to the sununit with trees,
excepting where here and there a bare flank
swept up covered only with low, bright-leaved
shrubs. They were mountains with purple
shadows in their hollows, their slopes blue and
276
^spy Bay
a> ...,.1 ■ ■■..■■■■ ■«■■ ..— .-I.— ., ■ — ■■■.— ^ .— -— - -..„-— .oiiwi mmi^miaiiimmtimmm'Mmmmmm^mmmma
green, with rjiinbuv/ colours in the niisf filled
openings between them, — mountains that rose
from the level plain, like vast and lovely
spirits.
Ab Smoky excels in magnitude the moun-
tains of iMiglishtown, so do the mour.tains f)f
Aspy Hay excel Smoky, yet they are l)cautifwl
rather than grand. More than one lovely
slope was painted with prismatic colours, the
varying shades of red rock being blended with
cx(piiaitc tones of green, yellow, and blue,
while seaward a warm rose tint, a sweet alpine
glow, lay along some of the slopes.
The valley was in a state of high cultivation,
and hidden behind clumps of trees were the
scattered farmhouses. Evidently peace and
plenty reigned here, a lovely oasis in a great
wilderness. The houses were roomy and well
built, and everything about them betokened
prosperity. Wc stopped on the bridge that
crossed the river, surprised and pleased, and
looked and looked again.
Mountains and valley were before us, while
off to the right shone the blue bay from which
the place gets its name. It was as usual toward
night as we thus drew near our stopping-place,
877
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Down North and Up Along
and an Indian summer haze intensified the
beauty of the waning day.
As we got closer, the mountains, without
losing their marvellous colouring, became more
distinctly individual, those behind being joined
to those in front only by their long overlap-
ping slopes and the colour-filled spaces between.
We were happy thus to find our blue bar-
rier resolved into endless forms of beauty,
mountain lying beyond mountain, while here
and there a glen opened to let out a foaming
brook and make windows through which we
caught glimpses of exquisitely lovely moun-
tain forms beyond.
We were on our way to Zwicker*s, and in
the estimation of the people of Cape North he
who does not know Zwicker's does not know
much.
" You will know it," the people told us ; " it
will be the big house." And so we did know
it when at last we got there.
It stands near the road in a friendly fashion,
and is half house, half store, the store occupy-
ing one wing of the building.
But inside the house is quite distinct from
the store, of whose proximity there is no sign.
278
long
[fied the
without
me more
ig joined
overlap-
between.
)lue bar-
beauty,
hile here
foaming
vhich we
y moun-
s, and In
^orth he
lot know
us ; " it
lid know
fashion,
occupy-
o
o
o
m
>
u
let from
lo sign.
jr'f .-jr-
ifpfti
• f i
5 !
i (■
tip
11
III
-
hs "
!
1 ■
A spy Bay
Zwicker's, or " Zwigger's," as the people call
it from Baddeck to Bay St. Lawrence, was a
surprise to us in more ways than one. It was
kept by two brothers, gentlemen by nature
and education. There were signs of foreign
travel and new books and recent issues of the
" American " magazines were lying about. The
house was not only roomy and comfortable,
very neat and well furnished, but afforded
luxuries not before enjoyed by us in Nova
Scotia.
There was an agreeable atmosphere about
the place, as of people who were accustomed to
the rational pleasures of life.
In the dining-room was a telegraphic instru-
ment whose clickety-click reminded us of the
world to which we belonged and of the mar.
vels achieved by man in that world.
What a moment that must have been in
Aspy Bay when the first transatlantic message
was received ! When the whole civilised world
held its breath to hear the momentous word
that, spoken in one continent, should leap to
another, vanquishing time and space, and in that
*fi^»^phant hour proclaim the conquest of
civilisation over barbarism, the death of war,
279
^v\S
11 ■.
lit >'
11 I , ;.,.
Down North and Up Along
^1 ■■! I ■ - ' -■■,. — I — I II M l. ■--,-, „ ■ — — . <
and the birth of universal peace upon earth.
It takes war a long time to die and universal
peace a long time to get out of its swaddling
clothes, but these things will surely come to
pass. The submarine cable and war cannot
live together on the same planet.
We were unexpected guests at Zwicker*s ;
and such an event as our arrival must have
occasioned the greatest astonishment, if not
absolute consternation, to the two men whom
fate, by taking away the mother, had left to
continue the home as best they could. But we
were received with such courtesy, and enter-
tained with such skilful hospitality, that we
did not know, until after we had left, that the
brothers constituted the whole household.
The history of Aspy Bay dates as far back
as that of Englishtown and Ingonish, — at least
in those days it had a name, the same it bears
to-day ; and the French voyager Pinchon speaks
also of this place, for he did not stop his trav-
els until he had gone the whole length of the
coast.
" Leaving Niganiche, we came to the creek
of Owarachouque," — which creek was that, we
should like to know, the creek at Neils Har-
280
m
long
>n earth,
universal
waddling
come to
r cannot
wicker's ;
List have
t, if not
;n whom
d left to
But we
id enter-
that we
that the
old.
far back
— at least
I it bears
)n speaks
his trav-
:h of the
16 creek
that, we
ils Har-
Aspy Bay
hour or our Black Brook perchance? — "and
from thence successively to the harbour of
Aspe, Cape North, the creek of St. Lawrence,
and the cape of the same name. Cape North,
or the mountain which forms it, is a peninsula
joining to th*^ island of Cape Breton by a very
low neck of land. But none of these places
are inhabited, or hardly at all frequented."
So much for " Aspe " prior to 1760; and in
truth it is not very densely inhabited yet, nor
is it frequented to the extent its lagoons run-
ning into the land from the sea and its soulful
mountains deserve.
In the early part of the century the evicted
Scotch peasants seeking homes found the
lovely and fertile valley, and the flourishing
appearance of the settlement is testimonial
enough to the character of the land, for where
the land is good the people are always well-
to-do and happy, if other people who do not
draw the furrow or wield the sickle will let
them alone.
There is a delightful lounging-place on the
water's edge a field or two from Zwicker's, a
warm grassy bluff where one can lie in the
sunshine with the same rat-tatting grasshoppers
aSi
H
I ,/
1(1
Pffi*
Down North and Up Along
scurrying about in the same panic-stricken
haste that gave us such bootless chase on
Beaman's Mountain, and watch the changing
light on the mountains or on the blue bay.
Over the bay, among the little islands, boats
with brown sails were gliding about, for the
people here dye, or, as they say, tan, their sails
to make them last longer, and these brown-
sailed boats add much to the charm of the
picture.
Aspy Bay, like the Bay of St. Anne, is almost
shut up by a long cobblestone bar ; and a reef
of cobblestones at our left, as we sat facing the
sea, was thickly grown with the Mertensia Mari-
tima, now in full bloom. It was a comfort to
see this and know that we had not really been
guilty of pulling up the very last one in " Cape
North " when we so shamefully exterminated
the pretty thing on Englishtown's pebbly bar.
How long the Mertensia Maritima will be
left to adorn the cobblestone bar of Aspy Bay
is a question, for the Newfoundland steamer
calls here, and it is easy to step aboard at Halifax
and come straight to this beautiful and health-
ful spot, sure of a safe landing and a courteous
reception away down north. And some day
282
^t:: U'j
-stricken
hase on
:hanging
bay.
ds, boats
for the
heir sails
: brown-
i of the
is almost
id a reef
acing the
sia Mari-
mfort to
Uy been
n " Cape
Irminated
bly bar.
will be
spy Bay
steamer
Halifax
health-
urteous
me day
A Spy Bay
the work-weary and nature-hangry souls from
the cities are going to find out these things ;
and then, Mertensia Maritima, you may say
good-bye to your cobblestone bar. For these
new-comers will love you, and will pull you up
by the roots, and in a little while will throw
you away, and that will be the end of you.
We left Zwicker's and faced again " down
north," but this was the end, — one more day
of delightful lingering along the wayside, enjoy-
ing sea and mountain, coming upon new and
unexpected beauties of land and sea, and all
would be known. There would be no more
mystery, no more wondering " what next," for
we should come to Bay St. Lawrence and that
was the end.
For some distance beyond Zwicker's the
mountains are on one side of the road and the
sea on the other; and when there is no wind
the mountains can be seen inverted on the
water, where they are almost more lovely than
standing in the air.
We passed close to Sugar Loaf, the high-
est mountain of all, and were tempted. The
top looked so near and so inviting ! But we
knew that it was not near and that we could
283
"CM
-^
i
i I
' i r
v.!
Down North and Up Along
not get to it without first getting badly lost,
for these mountains of beauty are very stern
realities when one attempts to ascend them, and
guides are necessary.
It is a short stage to Bay St. Lawrence, and
we did not start very early nor yet hurry on
the road.
From Baddeck to Zwicker's is a distance of
one hundred and one miles by the road, we
were pleased to learn. The guide-books make
the distance much shorter, but the guide-
books are wrong. Any one who has travelled
the road will know that it is no less than one
hundred and one miles.
The distance from Zwicker's to Bay St. Law-
rence is only from five to eight miles, accord-
ing to the part of Bay St. Lawrence to which
one goes. We went eight miles, that is, as far
as it is possible for mortal man to go in a
waggon.
After Sugar Loaf is passed, the road turns
away from the sea and passes in back of the
mountains. As soon as one gets behind the
mountains, the scenery is dreary and consists of
stretches of fir and spruce trees broken only by
rushing streams and an occasional valley, where
284
tl:
dly lost,
ry stern
lem, and
;nce, and
lurry on
stance of
road, we
)ks make
e guide-
travelled
than one
/ St. Law-
s, accord-
to which
is, as far
go in a
lad turns
Ick of the
ihind the
insists of
only by
ley, where
A Spy Bay
somebody has undertaken the cultivation of
barley and potatoes.
The way became so desolate and dreary for
a space that we began as usual to despair of
anything beyond. The only birds willing to
stay in this wilderness were the juncos ; and why
they should go for ever flitting down north
toward the icy sea, it is probable none but a
junco can explain.
Where there are cone-bearing trees, there will
be squirrel folk. Where bird-notes are lack-
ing, the song of the squirrel comes not amiss.
Indeed, it is pleasant even where there are birds,
and one hearing it for the first time may well
be excused for mistaking the varied and ex-
pressive solo for the song of some member of
the feathered tribe. It usually begins as if the
performer had been seized with a violent and
uncontrollable ague that caused his teeth to
chatter fast and furious. Chatter, chatter,
faster, faster, until the sounds run together
and make a pleasant musical note, the pitch
of which the performer varies apparently at
will and to give meaning to his song. He
sings with such abandon and such long-sus-
tained effort that he ought to drop panting at
285
A
*
4 1
r
H
»•
Down North and Up Along
your feet when he finishes with a dozen staccato
barks. But not he. W*^'le you are pitying
his condition, he is cooL .ropping scales on
your head from a fir cone which he is cutting
up with as much energy as if he had not sung
a note within the memory of man. He is good
company in the woods, as he never fails to as-
sault you with a torrent of squirrel back talk,
which is a great deal better than no talk, and
then he will very likely make amends by sing-
ing to you, though, truth to tell, you never feel
quite sure whether his ' ^markable and very
energetic song would be ranslating to polite
ears.
Our fears for what was to come as we moved
over the last stage of our journey turned out
as they always did. The dreary behind-the-
mountain road suddenly brought us into a new
world; and as had happened each time before,
as soon as the view burst upon us, we were
tempted to exclaim, " This, then, is better than
all the rest."
m
286
4 long
— -—
en staccato
ire pitying
r scales on
; is cutting
d not sung
He is good
fails to as-
back talk,
3 talk, and
ds by sing-
1 never feel
; and very
ig to polite
5 we moved
turned out
behind-the-
j into a new
time before,
as, we were
, better than
XIX
CAPE NORTH
BAY ST. LAWRENCE is different
from all the rest. It is the Ultima
Ihule, the end of everything, the
place where the land comes to a sud-
den stop as though saying to the sea, " You have
conquered, I can push against you no farther ;
but see what a battlement I have reared to
vkals^' ''' ^"'^ ^'"^ ^°" ^"'^ ^'""^ "^y '°^^y
Whe. one gels to Bay St. Lawrence he can
no longer pursue his devious, half-fearful, but
wholly fascmating course « down north," for
as he stands on the high bluff and looks over
the pitiless northern sea, he knows that at last
he ts down north," that the half-dreaded
mountams and swamps have been passed, that
for days and days he has been a tramp, a gypsy,
eatmg by the roadside and drinking from way-
side streams, begging hospitality -- to be well
paid for- from the people along the road and
revellmg as he always dreamed of, but never
287
I
\
'. !
Down North and Up Along
expected to revel, in the free outdoor life of
an untamed and beau^^'^l land.
One can have all the delights and discom-
forts of pioneer life in Cape North with none
of its dangers.
Bay St. Lawrence is scooped out of the stony-
land between stone mountains that guard it to
east and west. But the settlement near the
shore is also called Bay St. Lawrence and is
surrounded on three sides by the mountains
and on the fourth by the sea. It is on a
plateau of exquisitely rolling swells, for the
most part grown over by soft tawny-white
grass and spacious enough to give the effect
of downs. It is a clean grassy amphitheatre
shut from the world by mountains and sea.
Close against the mountains that shut it
from the eastern sea is McDougal's Cove,
where are only three or four houses all sur-
rounded by broad meadows, through which we
could find no road but only waggon tracks
going in all directions as if intending to lead
the stranger astray and land him on the bank
of the bridgeless brook that gurgles through
these puzzling meadows.
In approaching McDov.gaFs Cove we
388
Cape North
crossed a gully in the land, a deep cut, along
the bottom of which flowed a tiny brook, at
one time no doubt quite a masterful torrent ;
but its days of rampage were over, — it had
waxed old, thin, and feeble, and the deep hole
it had cut now formed the cosey hiding-place
for two or three blacked-roofed fish-houses and
a few fishi.ig-boats. So deep was this gully
that the buildings were entirely hidden until
we stood fairly over their heads and looked
down upon them.
Mr. and Mrs. Donald McDonald and their
sons and daughters live in their tiny home near
the bluflf overlooking the northern sea and
overshadowed by the great rock that rises a
thousand feet from the water, and is twin to the
bluff that is the veritable Cape North, and
which stands to the eastward of this.
It is certainly a mortifying statement to have
to make, but we are not sure that we really saw
Cape North, after, all. There was an impene-
trable haziness about the people's ideas as to
just exactly which bluff it was that distressed
us and confused our understanding. It is
probable, however, that, having gone to Bay
St. Lawrence to see Cape North, we did not see
19 2S9
•'>
Down North and Up Along
it. We now think it lay concealed behind the
splendid headland that came up out of the sea
at McDougal's Cove, and which no doubt is
every whit as good as Cape North. Still — !
It was a noble bluff that we saw, and it vividly
recalled Smolry's red front, though this mass
rises almost perpendicularly. It is followed
inland by another and similar uprising of red
rock, and that by another, and so on and on,
all of them sending great buttresses out toward
the grassy plains and finally framing in the
splendid amphitheatre of rolling meadow-land.
The mountains surrounding Bay St. Law-
rence are of bare rock. The fir-trees, the
spruces and hemlocks, discreetly remain at their
bases making a dark-green border to their
bright-coloured walls. There is great beauty
in the grim slopes of bare red rock ; the colour
of them is amazing ; lichens and bushes, or it
may be only the reflection of the afternoon
light at different angles from the scarred sur-
face, have made them beautiful beyond telling.
There is a sense of space, of peace, and
almost of awe in the presence of these strong
slopes with the wide grassy plain at their base,
and the feeling of vastness and isolation is in-
290
u'
Cape North
creased by the height of the plain above the
shoreless sea that spreads before mountains and
meadows.
The great bluff at McDougal's Cove rises
from the sea in a solid wsli around which one
must pass in a boat to the outer bluff which is
indeed Cape North. There is a path over the
back of the mountain, however, a rough path
to climb, through coniferous trees where on
the sheltered side they flourish, and over bare
stones where the trees fail.
Katie McDonald, blooming daughter of our
new-made friends, was to go over the mountain
the very afternoon of our arrival. For on the
other side, accessible only by boat and this
rude mountain path, is a cove where has been
built a lobster factory. The factory is owned
by the son of a certain Rory McLeod, known
to fame as Big Rory because of his uncommon
height. Money Point is over there by the
lobster factory ; and it is Money Point because
once — a long time ago — a specie ship was
wrecked, and the coin fell into the water, where
for many a year it was fished out or thrown up
by storms and came into the hands of eager
seekers.
291
V
1.1
In,
ma
V '■■
\, it
■h;
Down North and Up Along
The money of Money Point is still fished
out of the sea, but not in the form of specie.
It comes out as lobster to be later transformed
into money.
Sometimes lobsters are scarce even here, and
there are none to can. This happened one
year when the mountains were red with wild
strawberries and the canny son of Big Rory did
then, so we were told, set his people to canning
strawberries instead of lobsters, and reaped the
reward he deserved, for these mountain straw-
berries, the people say, are very large and juicy
and wonderfully flavoured.
We were told, too, that on the back side of
one of the mountains red currants grow wild
and in great profusion ; but this marvel we did
not see with our own eyes, though we saw a
great many strawberry vines and some of them
foolishly in bloom.
Katie McDonald was going over to cook for
her brothers, who were canning lobsters, and
she did not seem to regard the excursion as
particularly pleasant; but when the time came
she started bravely enough, and we watched
her until she disappeared on the lonely moun-
tain, as though swallowed up by it.
SC2
MM
Cape North
We should have liked to go with Katie, but
there were reasons against it, and we contented
ourselves with climbing a bare spur to the top
of another mountain, hoping for a view of the
whole earth. As is always the case, it was far-
ther to the top than it seemed, and it was a
very steep slope upon which huge cliffs and
crags jutted out, not pleasant to surmount, and
perhaps not always quite safe. And at the top
— nothing ! He who climbs these mountains for
a view of the world will find himself on the edge
of a mile-wide plateau which is rough and bubbly,
and across which one cannot possibly see farther
than a few rods. So, after all, it does not pay
very well, for the view down into McDougal's
Cove from the mountain-top is not as good as
the view from the cove up the mountain, and
the latter can be had without any exertion.
In the McDonald home were a number of
sealskins, the seals being caught near here.
They are not the fur-bearing seal, but are
covered with a coarse light-coloured hair, so
their only value is in their leather. We did
not see any seals, but Charlevoix did, and in his
letters he tells certain things about them which
we may believe or not as we please : —
293
■k
7-
f\
i I
\
^1
Down North and Up Along
- — — 1
" The Sea Wolf, or the Seal," says he, " takes its
Name from its Cry, which is a Sort of howling ; for
in its shape it resembles not the Wolf, nor any land
animal that we know. Lescarbot asserts that he has
heard some cry like Screech-Owls ; but these might
be only young ones, whose Cry was not quite formed.
They make no Hesitation here. Madam, to place it in
the Rank of Fishes ; though it is not mute, though it
is brought forth on the Land, and lives as much on it
as in the Water, and is covered with Hair : In a
word, though it wants nothing to make it to be con-
sidered as an amphibious creature. The war they
make with the Seals, though it is often on Land, and
with the Gun, is called a Fishery.
*' The Head of a Seal is something like a Bull-Dog's:
He has four Legs, very short, especially those behind :
In every other Respect it is a Fish. It drags itself
rather thi.n walks upon its Feet. Its Legs before
have Nails, those behind are like Fins ; His Skin is
hard, and covered with short Hair of divers Colours.
There are some Seals all white, and they are all so
when young ; but some, as they grow up, become
black, others tawny ; many are all these Colours
mixed together."
The skins of these creatures were tanned
with the bark of the spruce-tree and used for
boots and all other articles made of leather.
294
Cape North
Their flesh was eaten, and their oil used in
cooking and for lighting. We are told that as
many as eight hundred young ones were some-
times killed in one day, so probably one
would wait as long to see a live seal in these
waters as to see a moose in the mountains back
of Ingonish.
At the McDonalds' we were enlightened
concerning certain pieces of furniture which
occasionally were found in the fisher-folk's
houses, — furniture out of all keeping with the
simple cottage fittings, furniture that belonged
rather to the cities or the country-houses of
the well-to-do. But here we learned that
these articles were the flotsam and jetsam from
the many vessels wrecked on that cruel coast,
and it was hinted that time was when certain
of the settlers busied themselves more in be-
coming possessed of the spoil than in assist-
ing the drowning.
To leave Bay St. Lawrence was to turn
southward and retrace our steps over moun-
tains and swamps. Reluctantly we turned
from the cold northern sea and the fine amphi-
theatre with its encircling mountains of bare
rock that were so wonderfully beautiful in the
295
i
t
P 'iv
Down North and Up Along
evening glow. Reluctantly we bade adieu to
the McDonalds', and their cordial hospitality
that rang more like English than Scotch metal.
Yet the return proved about as enjoyable as
the first passing. True, the uncertainty as to
what next was gone ; we knew what next,
but that had its advantages. It was pleasant
to meet again the people and to be received
now like old friends. It was pleasant t-o carry
the bits of neighbourhood gossip from station
to station — like troubadours of old. And
the scenery we found was quite new. For
we were turned around now and looking the
other way. It is impossible, moreover, to see
everything in once passing, so that the return
trip was fully as enjoyable as the first coming.
We did not linger going back. We did
not dare, for there was a threat of rain which
was not to be ignored, unless we desired to
add to our other experiences that of a typical
Cape Breton autumn storm. And that of all
things we did not desire, for there were few
places we should have cared to remain in,
storm-bound, even for a day. So we pressed
ahead, past Zwicker's and past Aspy Bay,
lovely in the hazy atmosphere. Nor did we
296
' ^, - V - -\ . "
A FisHiNc; Schooner
SI
i
.,
Cape North
stop until we had reached the hospitable roof
of the Half Way House, where we found all
as we had left it, excepting that the maternal
cat, having been deprived of her kitten, which
a passing Highlander had begged to take with
him, persisted in washing the face of the white
dog with a black head. As to the dog him-
self, perhaps the least said the better. He
was bearing it as well as he could, but the
looks he cast upon the mistaken cat we
feared did not augur well for her future
happiness.
After a good night's rest at the Half Way
House, we were oiF in the cold morning, leav-
ing Mrs. McPherson with reluctance, and she
too, seemed loath to have us go. It seemed
as if we had known the people of "Cape
North " a very long time and were parting
from old friends for ever. Before the bushes
swallowed us up, we turned for a last look
and on the doorstep sat the abused dog'
wondering, no doubt, how long he could
stand It, while the cat, regardless of conse-
quences, continued to wash his already too
clean countenance.
Sometimes we stopped at our old camp,
297
J
Down North and Up Along
fires, where they were in particularly favour-
able spots, and sometimes we found new
places for the noonday rest.
The people in the barley fields nodded to
us and sometimes even smiled. They had
had time to talk us over and compare notes,
and though we might be a little "lacking" to
go on such a purposeless journey, still they
felt in their hearts that we were harmless.
We passed the Ingonishes without stopping
until we had crossed the ferry at the foot of
Smoky. We did it to save time, for often the
men are away in the morning on the more im-
portant business of fishing, and the traveller is
obliged to await their return. It was just at
nightfall when we crossed the ferry trusting to
our oft-tried and never-failing |»owers of per-
suasion to get taken in at some wayside cottage
on the other side. This time we came near
making a fatal mistake, for the cottages at the
foot of Smoky would none of us. They
were few' and far between, n»^d it is true
were tiny, and no do^ c true, as they
said, that there )m r us. At last
we cast anchor in ine in , nich we knew was a
spare room and where v is a small barn. They
298
4 long
ly favour-
)und new
nodded to
rhey had
•are notes,
eking " to
still they
less.
: stopping
e foot of
often the
more im-
raveller is
as just at
•usting to
"s of per-
le cottage
ame near
jes at the
They
is true
, as they
At last
ew was a
1. They
Cape North
said they could n't ; we said they must. They
said it was impossible, and we pictured in
graphic terms the alternative, our being obliged
to spend the cold night on the mountain-
side, where they would go out next day and
find our frozen forms, and be obliged to bury
us then and there, and be pointed to by all
posterity as the cruel folk who had turned
travellers from their door, to perish on the
mountain. They saw the reasonableness of
the argument, and we stayed,. though it is not
quite fair to say they allowed it, suffered it
would be better ; at least until all hands were
well warmed up over the kitchen stove, and
a supper of oatmeal porridge had lent a more
genial glow to all our heart-strings. Then we
fell into friendly conversation, and the woman
showed us her rugs, and the man told us
of the awful night when he rescued Parson
Gibbons from sure death on the side of
Smoky.
Many of these people are endowed with
"second sight," and all believe in it. The
story the man told was this : One night,
bitter cold and snowing, he had a sudden
kiiowledge that Parson Gibbons was on the
299
r,
\
.,
t
Down North and Up Along
^tmm%. M *»m jii i w. ■ i«ii II ■■!■— ■■■i^.^ — i«»«».^«« T- ^.Mwi.. M i l— ■!■ I iBii . — — »Mi^«i. n w* - .tmtmmmmmm
ntouiUiiiii !nul in trouble, lie prrparcil to go
out aiul his wife sjiitl it was tolly, for the parson
was not cx|H'cteil to puss at that time of the
month. But juich terror now seized the man
that he was compelled to go; and stumbling
through the snow he at last found the object of
his search, who, overcome by the colil, had sunk
down and ceaseil to exert himself. If he had
not been fouml in this strange way, he would
surely have perished that night.
At Wreck Cove we opened three large gates
and crossed three broad meadows in order to
make our call upon Hig Kory's folks Big
Rory himself was not at home ; but we visited
with Mrs. Kory, who, we were pleased to find,
was sister to Mrs. McLeod of iMiglishtown.
From Big Rory's to Indian Brook, the way
was lovely, for the mountains of beauty were
about us, and wc caught occasional glimpses of
those cf iMiglishtown across the sea.
The last night we spent at Angus Mc-
Donald's, who had a large house in the " flat
lands " not far from Indian Brook. We had
lingered along the way, visiting with old friends
and being hailed by new ones, for our fame
had gone abroad, and every one who was
300
Cape North
related to any one wc had met — and who
is not related in that part of the world? —
claimed acquaintance, and it wa» dark 'ocforc
wc reached our destination, and we were
troubled. Just as the case began to look
serious, wc saw a dirn form approaching. We
asked it the way to Angus McDonald's, and
the man replied that he was Angus McDonald
himself, and was on the way home, and that
wc had missed the turn and must go hack
a little way. Providential meeting! Gladly
we retraced our steps, and were soon in the
warmth of the McDonald hearthstone.
It rained all night, and in the morning the
sky was wet and sullen, hut we decided to
press on. Better a wetting than isolation in
any of these cottages ; so on we went, and
soon the rain came down as if in a fury at
having let us escape so long. We crossed the
iron bridge over the Barasois River and did
not turn to the left toward Torquil McLane's
ferry, for the waves ran high in Englishtown
Harbour and there would be no crossing there
that day. So we turned to the right and went
" North River way," which is longer but not
complicated by ferries.
301
Down North and Up Along
We thought we had seen brooks before, but
that day's drive convinced us that we had until
then known nothing about the subject. Then,
too, was explained the use of the many appar-
ently useless bridges ; under every one poured a
torrent, — indeed, the road itself was often a
mountain torrent up which or down which Dan
waded, keeping to the road by some instinct
which we had not. There came a place where
we were surrounded by water, and where there
was a pond at one side, we knew not how deep.
The road took a turn along the edge of the
pond ; but what turn, which way should we go
to keep on terra firma beneath the rushing
flood ? We were in despair, and finally told
Dan to go his own way, which he did, and took
us safely through.
Down the mountain sides rushed foaming
streams that plunged straight across the road ;
every mountain was streaked with white lines
of foam and dashing water. The world had
gone brook-mad. Sometimes the rain fell so
heavily as to obscure everything but the
watery way in front; th^n it ceased, and we
looked out upon the earth soaked and fresh,
and covered with brooks.
302
Cape North
We were soon soaked to the skin, but in spite
of that we were thrilled and warmed by the
beauty of the rain-clad mountains. There,
wonderflii to relate ! did the crisp moss on the
trees in a moment fluff out into soft masses
of delicious green ; did the stringy beards on
the limbs of the spruces expand and become
light and graceful, and able to sway in beautiful
curves; did the grim woods turn into fairy
palaces with deep soft carpets of lovely moss
and exquisite tapestry on every tree and rock.
The road was new and lovely and in the
sunshine must be a wonder-land of splendid
mountain scenery, judging from the occasional
glimpses we caught through the mists.
Our dinner that day consisted of crackers
and cheese and apples, which we sat in the
waggon and ate, while Dan munched his oats
as best he could standing in his tracks in the
road.
It was a wild storm, and the road seemed
endless. We struggled along from early
mornmg until almost nightfall, finally entering
Baddeck chilled to the marrow and thoroughly
miserable, while Dan seemed hardly able to take
another step.
303
'r ^€-
Down North and Up Along
A few hours later, sitting coseyly before a
glowing fire, dry and warm, with that delicious
drowsiness that comes under such circum-
stances, the pictures of our trip " down north "
kept flitting before our minds ; and the dearest
pictUiC of all was of the mossy rain-drenched
forest road with the newborn brooks tumbling
across our path. The wetting did us no
harm, and the day in the rain was a fitting
ending to our strange and delightful journey
"down north."
304
■HHtfiaii
OliiaHla
long
before a
delicious
circum-
1 north "
e dearest
drenched
rumbling
I us no
a fitting
journey