The barber does not stop at the head, either. At the slightest weakness on your part, he beckons from one of his—well—side chapels, a brisk and imperturbable manicurist. There are manicurists in all barbers' shops. Like the barbers, they are artists in their cult, and while he works on the head the manicurist accomplishes miracles of perfection on the nails, with scented baths, hot swathings, unguents, steel weapons and orange sticks.
And while these things are occurring to you, you can have a Shoe Shine pundit from another corner, and I daresay you can have a chiropodist at the same time, so that for twenty minutes there is going on about your body a feverish concentration of activity that makes even Henry Ford's assembling department look spiritless.
King Street sweeps broadly uphill to King Square, which is a large and pleasant garden, merging imperceptibly into the old graveyard, the grey old headstones of which add serenity to the charm of the park.
The Square itself seems to be the Harley Street of St. John, for among the big buildings, and the "apartment" blocks, which are really flats, I came upon the plates of many doctors, who, in the unexpected American manner, add their special qualifications under their name, so that I read:
"Dr. John X——,
Throat, Ear and Nose."
The streets of St. John lead out at right-angles from this central group of square and street, for this is the West, where the parallel road-making of efficient town-planning reigns. Some of these streets are carved out of the grim, grey, slaty rock, that even now crops out in the midst of the stone and brick and wood of human effort, to show upon what stubborn stuff the first founders had to build.
In the residential streets, and particularly in the suburbs, the homes are planned charmingly. The houses are of brick or wood, most of them built in the Colonial style, and all pleasantly gabled, and of a bright and attractive colour, while every one has the deep and comely porch, upon which are scattered rocking and easy chairs, and even settees.
The houses are surrounded by the greenest lawns, and these lawns are not marred by walls or fences, but run right down to the curb, with but a strip of sidewalk for pedestrians. This elimination of railings is a thing that might well be imitated in our country; it gives the residential districts a pretty and park-like air that is altogether delightful.
We passed through miles of such homes in a journey round the deep bay of the harbour to the place where the Dauntless, dwarfed by the high lock walls, lay alongside the quay. There is a steam ferry connecting the two peninsulas that landlock the harbour, but our automobile driver, no doubt, had the civic spirit and wanted to show us both the beauties of suburban St. John, the great cantilever bridge across the St. John river and the famous Reversible Falls.
The Reversible Falls are at the mouth of the St. John river, where it pushes through the high limestone cliffs into the harbour. At low tide there is the authentic fall, as the river cascades over the rock in a drop of fifteen feet, but the extraordinarily tide of the Bay of Fundy, rising ten feet above the river level, actually reverses things, and forces back the flood along the channel with some turbulence.