The St. John below is much like a broad and placid lake flowing through a pastoral country, having long tributary lakes and bays, including the extensive and attractive Kennebecasis, which is the favorite rural resort of the St. John people and the scene of their aquatic sports. The river farther down broadens into Grand Bay, and then passing the narrow gorge of the "reversible cataract," makes the expansive harbor of St. John, and is ultimately swallowed up by the Bay of Fundy.
ANNAPOLIS AND MINAS BASINS.
From St. John River across the Bay of Fundy to Digby Gut in Nova Scotia is forty-five miles. For one hundred and thirty miles, the North Mountain Ridge, elevated six hundred feet, stretches along the bay upon the Nova Scotia shore, sharply notched down at Digby Gut, the entrance to Annapolis Basin. This strait, barely a half-mile wide, is cut two miles through the mountain ridge, having a tidal current of six miles an hour, and within is a magnificent salt-water lake, surrounded by forests sloping up the hillsides, and one of the pleasantest sheets of water in the world. It is no wonder that De Monts, when his colonists abandoned the dreary island in St. Croix River, sought refuge here, and that his companion, Baron de Poutrincourt, obtained a grant for the region. It is one of the most attractive parts of Acadia, and as the old song has it:
"This is Acadia—this the land
That weary souls have sighed for;
This is Acadia—this the land
Heroic hearts have died for."
Digby is within the Gut, fronted by a long and tall wooden wharf that has to deal with fifty feet of tide, its end being an enormous square timber crib, built up like a four-story house. The town is noted for luscious cherries and for "Digby Chickens," the most prized brand of herrings cured by the "Blue-noses," and it has also developed into quite an attractive watering-place. To the southwestward a railway runs to Yarmouth, at the western extremity of Nova Scotia, a small but very busy port, having steamer lines in various directions. To the northeastward Annapolis Basin stretches sixteen miles between the enclosing hills, gradually narrowing towards the extremity. Here, on the lowlands adjoining Annapolis River, is the quaint little town of Annapolis Royal and the extensive ramparts of the ancient fort that guarded it, covering some thirty acres. This was the original French capital of Acadia, and the first permanent settlement made by Europeans in America north of St. Augustine, De Monts founding the colony in 1605. He named it Port Royal, but the English Puritans a century later changed this, in honor of their "good Queen Anne," to Annapolis Royal. Almost from the first settlement to the final capture by the Puritan expedition from Boston in 1710, its history was a tale of battles, sieges and captures by many chieftains of the rival nations. As the Marquis of Lorne in his Canadian book describes it: "This is the story which is repeated with varying incidents through all the long-drawn coasts of the old Acadia. We see, first, the forest village of the Red Indians, with its stockades and patches of maize around it; then the landing from the ships, under the white flag sown with golden lilies, of armored arquebussiers and spearsmen; the skirmishing and the successful French settlement; to be followed by the coming of other ships, with the red cross floating over the high-built sterns, and then the final conflict and the victory of the British arms." Now everything is peaceful, and the people raise immense crops of the most attractive apples for shipment to Europe.
East of Annapolis is the "Garden of Nova Scotia." The long ridge of the North Mountain on the coast screens it from the cold winds and fogs, while the parallel ridge of the South Mountain stretches for eighty miles, and between these noble ranges, which are described as "most gracefully moulded," is a broad and rich intervale extending to the Basin of Minas and the land of Evangeline, which Longfellow has made so sadly poetical. Good crops of hay grow on the fertile red soils, which the farmers gather with their slowly-plodding ox-teams; and of this region the poet sang mournfully:
"This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,