After Icebergs with a Painter / A Summer Voyage to Labrador and Around Newfoundland.

by Louis Legrand Noble

CHAPTER LXII.

NEW GLASGOW.—THE RIDE TO TRURO.—THE RAILWAY RIDE TO HALIFAX.—PARTING WITH THE PAINTER.

Tuesday, July 26. New Glasgow. We halt here for breakfast, after a sociable and merry ride of several hours from Antigonish, where, after a refreshing sleep, we were favored by a change of coaches, and the pleasant company of an officer of the English army. Here is a broad and fertile vale with a pretty river and town; all reminding us of New England. Across the river are coal-mines, a railroad, and the roar of cars, merely coal-cars, however. Tide-water is close by, setting in from the Strait of Northumberland, the lengthy water lying between the mainland and Prince Edward’s Island. We are all ready for our ride to Truro, on Mines Bay, or a spur of it, an eastern reach of the Bay of Fundy, and distant forty miles, where we take the cars for Halifax, or all the world. Those wonderful cars! Why, at Truro, I shall begin to feel at home, a point more remote than Europe, in the day of only sails and horse-power.

The ride is cheering, as we take it on the coach-top in the breezy, bright day. Broad farms, with barns and dwellings, grass and grain and orchards, cattle and bleating sheep spread out upon the hills, and stretch along the valleys. The plain of Truro has many of the features of a populous and well-cultivated county. Its groves and trees and wide meadows, waiting for the mower, form a pretty and extended landscape. The town itself, reached at three o’clock, with its central square and grass and shades, is too much like a village of New England to need further mention. While at dinner, the whistle of the locomotive indicated the direction of the station, a welcome call, which we obeyed with rather more than ordinary alacrity. The ride to Halifax, which occupied from four o’clock until dusk, was by no means at Yankee speed, and took us through a thinly inhabited country, somewhat broken, and interspersed with woods and waters—a region that makes no very definite or lasting impression, and yet one that the traveller looks out upon with some pleasure. The last few miles along the banks of the river flowing into Halifax Bay was a lovely valley ride. Rounded hills and bluffs green and bowery, and handsome residences looking out between pretty groves and down grassy lawns, never appeared more attractive. Had we been going the other way, perhaps they would not have seemed deserving of more than a passing look. In the weary hours, and along the torrid portions of the path of life, I am sure that I shall remember the quiet, refreshing scenery of that river, and wish myself among its graceful and placid beauties. From the noisy station we trundled in an omnibus through the narrow streets of an old-fashioned, hill-side city, crowned with a fortress looking off south upon a bay and the distant ocean, and alighted at a hotel of stories and many windows, where we heard a gong, instrument of Pandemonium, and took tea with the relish of medicine, and talked over the conclusion of our journey. As haste was more requisite on my part, I resolved to post across the province to Windsor, that night, and leave the painter to wend his way homeward at his leisure.

CHAPTER LXIII.

COACH RIDE AT NIGHT FROM HALIFAX TO WINDSOR.—THE PRINCE EDWARD’S MAN, AND THE GENTLEMAN FROM NEWFOUNDLAND.

Immersed in fog, and shut up in a small coach, three of us, a Prince Edward’s man and a gentleman from Newfoundland, rode at a round trot, with but two or three brief intermissions, from ten o’clock in the evening until six next morning. The country, I conclude—if a man may have any conclusions, who rides with his eyes fast shut, and sleeps and nods—is a succession of hills and dales. From the bridges, over which we rumbled, and from the crowing of the cocks at midnight and at dawn, I argue that there were farms and streams. My companions were agreeable. Being partners in the enterprise, at the cost of twenty-two dollars and a half for an eight hours’ drive, we had fellow-feelings on all things in general, and upon the expensiveness of night travelling in Nova Scotia in particular. The Prince Edward’s man, a tradesman, was on his first visit to the States, in fact to the great world, and was a modest, thoughtful person, who talked as men of merely home experience are apt to talk, saying nothing to object to, nothing to startle, and some little to remember concerning the climate, the society, and products of his native isle. The gentleman from Newfoundland had seen the world to his soul’s content, and now was a most passionate lover of wild nature. He had dined with nobility and gentry, and could talk of them and of cities, from the end of his tongue; but of the pleasures of the sportsman in British America, out of his very heart. A more genial companion the lonely traveller could not easily light upon. I had seen him before, but forgot to mention it. It was at Murdoch’s, on the last Sunday, which I was sorry to recollect of him. He drove up about noon, in wood-man’s dress partly; washed, dined, and departed in great haste for Pictou, in order to reach Halifax in time for the very steamer that we were hoping to catch. With all his speed he missed it as well as we. Hinc illæ lachrymæ. In his conversation you heard the crack of the rifle, and the roar of the forest and the ocean. He was often reeling in the largest salmon and the finest trout, and bringing down with a crash in the brushwood the fattest of all bucks. The light of his nut-brown pipe, a costly article, flashing faintly on his well-marked face, reminded me of the red blaze of camp-fires in the woods, on the banks of mountain brooks, and the shores of solitary lakes. From one of a nature so companionable you part, on the road, after no longer than a day’s acquaintance, with genuine regret. He was a character for the novelist, with a head and countenance both for painter and sculptor.

CHAPTER LXIV.

WINDSOR.—THE AVON AND THE TIDE.—THE STEAMER FOR ST. JOHNS, NEW BRUNSWICK.—MINES BASIN.—COAST SCENERY.—THE SCENE OF EVANGELINE.—PARSBORO.—THE BAY OF FUNDY.—NOVA SCOTIA AND NEW BRUNSWICK SHORES.—ST. JOHNS.—THE MAINE COAST, AND GRAND MANAN.

Wednesday, July 27. Windsor, N. S. Soon after our arrival, I walked down to the Avon, an arm of Mines Bay, itself an expanded inlet of the great Bay of Fundy, to view the wonderful tide. It was not coming in, as I had hoped, but quite out, leaving miles of black river-bottom entirely bare, with only a small stream coursing through in a serpentine manner. A line of blue water was visible on the northern horizon. After an absence of an hour or so, I loitered back, when, to my surprise, there was a river like the Hudson at Catskill, running up with a powerful current. The high wharf, upon which, but a short time before, I had stood and surveyed the black, unsightly fields of mud, was now up to its middle in the turbid and whirling stream, and very nearly in, the steamer from St. Johns, N. B.