Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms,
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate, answers the wail of the forest."
To-day, however, "the murmuring pines and the hemlocks" are not there, excepting in stunted growth in occasional thickets, the land being meadow and grain fields, with many orchards. Upon a low-lying peninsula, washed by the placid waters of the Basin of Minas, is the "Great Meadow," the Grand Pré of the unfortunate Acadians, where in that early time they had reclaimed from the enormous tides some three square miles of land, while south of the meadow, on somewhat higher ground, was their little village. Beyond it the dark North Mountain ridge stretches to the promontory of Cape Blomidon, dropping off abruptly six hundred feet into the Basin of Minas. The contented French lived secluded lives here, avoiding much of the ravages of the wars raging elsewhere around the Bay of Fundy, and when France ceded Nova Scotia to England in 1713 they numbered about two thousand. They took the oaths of loyalty to the British crown, but in the subsequent French and Indian wars there was much disaffection, and it was determined in 1755 to remove all the French who lived around the Bay of Fundy, numbering some eight thousand, so that a loyal British population might replace them. In September the embarkation began from Grand Pré, one hundred and sixty young men being ordered aboard ship. They slowly marched from the church to the shore between ranks of the women and children, who, kneeling, prayed for blessings upon them, they also praying and weeping and singing hymns. The old men were sent next, but the wives and children were kept till other ships arrived. These wretched people were herded together near the sea, without proper food, raiment or shelter for weeks, until the transports came, and it was December before the last of them had embarked. In one locality a hundred men fled to the woods, and soldiers were sent to hunt them, often shooting them down. Many in various places managed to escape, some getting to St. John River, while not a few went to Quebec, and others found refuge in Indian wigwams in the forests. There were seven thousand, however, carried on shipboard from the Bay of Fundy to the various British colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia, being landed without resources and having generally to subsist on charity. To prevent their returning, all the French villages around the Bay of Fundy were laid waste and their homes ruined. In the Minas district two hundred and fifty houses and a larger number of barns were burnt. Edmund Burke in the British Parliament cried out against this treatment, saying: "We did, in my opinion, most inhumanly, and upon pretences that, in the eye of an honest man, are not worth a farthing, root out this poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern or to reconcile gave us no sort of right to extirpate." The sad story of Grand Pré and of Evangeline was historic before Longfellow's day, but he made it immortal.
MINAS TO HALIFAX.
The Basin of Minas, in the Micmac Indian tradition, was the beaver-pond and favorite abiding-place of their divinity, Glooscap. On the great promontory of Cape Blomidon, which stretches northward to enclose the Basin on its western side, he had his home. The ridge of the cape turns sharply to the westward and ends in Cape Split, alongside the Minas Channel. This formation has been compared to the curved handle of a huge walking-stick, the long North Mountain stretching far away being the stick. The Micmacs tell us that this ridge, now bent around to the westward, was Glooscap's beaver-dam, which he beneficently swung open, so that the surplus waters might run out and not overflow the meadows around the Basin of Minas. In swinging it around, however, the terminal cliff of Cape Split was broken off, and now rises in a promontory four hundred feet high just beyond the main ridge. Glooscap, we are told, began a conflict in the Basin with the Great Beaver, and threw at him the five vast rocks now known as the Five Islands on the northern shore to the eastward of Parrsboro'. The Beaver was chased out of the Basin, westward through the Minas Channel, and as a parting salute Glooscap threw his kettle at him, which overturning, became Spencer's Island, on the northern shore beyond Cape Split. The enormous tides run through the Minas Channel at eight miles an hour, and they helped to drive the Great Beaver over to St. John, where Glooscap finally conquered and killed him.
The formation around the head of the Bay of Fundy is largely of rich and fertile red lowlands, marsh and meadow, much of it being reclaimed by dyking. The same formation is carried over the Chignecto isthmus, east of the bay, where the Nova Scotia Peninsula is joined to the mainland. This is only seventeen miles wide, and across it has been projected the "Chignecto Ship Railway," designed to shorten by about five hundred miles the passage of vessels around the Nova Scotia Peninsula into the St. Lawrence. It is a system of railway tracks on which the design was to carry ships over the isthmus. Vessels of two thousand tons were to be lifted out of the water, placed in a huge cradle, and drawn across by locomotives. The project, estimated as costing $5,000,000, was stopped in partial completion for want of funds. On the meadow land to the southward of the Basin of Minas is Windsor on the Avon, a small shipping town, in which the most famous building near the river is a broad and oddly-constructed one-story house, called the Clifton Mansion, which was the home of the author of Sam Slick—Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, a native of Windsor, who died in 1865. Beyond is Ardoise Mountain, rising seven hundred feet and having on its northern verge the great Aylesford sand-plain whereof Sam Slick says: "Plain folks call it, in a gin'ral way, the Devil's Goose Pasture. It is thirteen miles long and seven miles wide; it ain't just drifting sands, but it's all but that, it's so barren. It's uneven or wavy, like the swell of the sea in a calm, and it's covered with short, thin, dry, coarse grass, and dotted here and there with a half-starved birch and a stunted, misshapen spruce. It is just about as silent and lonesome and desolate a place as you would wish to see. All that country thereabout, as I have heard tell when I was a boy, was once owned by the Lord, the king and the devil. The glebe-lands belonged to the first, the ungranted wilderness-lands to the second, and the sand-plain fell to the share of the last—and people do say the old gentleman was rather done in the division, but that is neither here nor there—and so it is called to this day the Devil's Goose Pasture." Over this sand-plain and the rocky, desolate ridge beyond, runs the great railway train of the Provinces, on the route between St. John and Halifax—dignified by the title of the "Flying Bluenose." It crosses the bleak flanks of Ardoise Mountain and Mount Uniacke, with its gold mines, through a region which the local chronicler describes as having "admirable facilities for the pasturage of goats and the procuring of ballast for breakwaters;" and then comes to the pleasant shores of Bedford Basin, running several miles along its beautiful western bank down to Halifax harbor.
THE GREAT BRITISH-AMERICAN FORTRESS.