第100章

I am sure the district schools would become what they are not now, if the geographers would make the other parts of the globe as attractive as the sonorous Bay of Fundy.The recitation about that is always an easy one; there is a lusty pleasure in the mere shouting out of the name, as if the speaking it were an innocent sort of swearing.From the Bay of Fundy the rivers run uphill half the time, and the tides are from forty to ninety feet high.For myself, I confess that, in my imagination, I used to see the tides of this bay go stalking into the land like gigantic waterspouts; or, when I was better instructed, I could see them advancing on the coast like a solid wall of masonry eighty feet high."Where," we said, as we came easily, and neither uphill nor downhill, into the pleasant harbor of St.John,---where are the tides of our youth?"They were probably out, for when we came to the land we walked out upon the foot of a sloping platform that ran into the water by the side of the piles of the dock, which stood up naked and blackened high in the air.It is not the purpose of this paper to describe St.

John, nor to dwell upon its picturesque situation.As one approaches it from the harbor it gives a promise which its rather shabby streets, decaying houses, and steep plank sidewalks do not keep.Acity set on a hill, with flags flying from a roof here and there, and a few shining spires and walls glistening in the sun, always looks well at a distance.St.John is extravagant in the matter of flagstaffs; almost every well-to-do citizen seems to have one on his premises, as a sort of vent for his loyalty, I presume.It is a good fashion, at any rate, and its more general adoption by us would add to the gayety of our cities when we celebrate the birthday of the President.St.John is built on a steep sidehill, from which it would be in danger of sliding off, if its houses were not mortised into the solid rock.This makes the house-foundations secure, but the labor of blasting out streets is considerable.We note these things complacently as we toil in the sun up the hill to the Victoria Hotel, which stands well up on the backbone of the ridge, and from the upper windows of which we have a fine view of the harbor, and of the hill opposite, above Carleton, where there is the brokenly truncated ruin of a round stone tower.This tower was one of the first things that caught our eyes as we entered the harbor.It gave an antique picturesqueness to the landscape which it entirely wanted without this.Round stone towers are not so common in this world that we can afford to be indifferent to them.This is called a Martello tower, but I could not learn who built it.I could not understand the indifference, almost amounting to contempt, of the citizens of St.John in regard to this their only piece of curious antiquity."It is nothing but the ruins of an old fort," they said;"you can see it as well from here as by going there." It was, how-ever, the one thing at St.John I was determined to see.But we never got any nearer to it than the ferry-landing.Want of time and the vis inertia of the place were against us.And now, as I think of that tower and its perhaps mysterious origin, I have a longing for it that the possession of nothing else in the Provinces could satisfy.

But it must not be forgotten that we were on our way to Baddeck; that the whole purpose of the journey was to reach Baddeck; that St.John was only an incident in the trip; that any information about St.

John, which is here thrown in or mercifully withheld, is entirely gratuitous, and is not taken into account in the price the reader pays for this volume.But if any one wants to know what sort of a place St.John is, we can tell him: it is the sort of a place that if you get into it after eight o'clock on Wednesday morning, you cannot get out of it in any direction until Thursday morning at eight o'clock, unless you want to smuggle goods on the night train to Bangor.It was eleven o'clock Wednesday forenoon when we arrived at St.John.The Intercolonial railway train had gone to Shediac; it had gone also on its roundabout Moncton, Missaquat River, Truro, Stewiack, and Shubenacadie way to Halifax; the boat had gone to Digby Gut and Annapolis to catch the train that way for Halifax; the boat had gone up the river to Frederick, the capital.We could go to none of these places till the next day.We had no desire to go to Frederick, but we made the fact that we were cut off from it an addition to our injury.The people of St.John have this peculiarity: they never start to go anywhere except early in the morning.

The reader to whom time is nothing does not yet appreciate the annoyance of our situation.Our time was strictly limited.The active world is so constituted that it could not spare us more than two weeks.We must reach Baddeck Saturday night or never.To go home without seeing Baddeck was simply intolerable.Had we not told everybody that we were going to Baddeck? Now, if we had gone to Shediac in the train that left St.John that morning, we should have taken the steamboat that would have carried us to Port Hawkesbury, whence a stage connected with a steamboat on the Bras d'Or, which (with all this profusion of relative pronouns) would land us at Baddeck on Friday.How many times had we been over this route on the map and the prospectus of travel! And now, what a delusion it seemed! There would not another boat leave Shediac on this route till the following Tuesday,--quite too late for our purpose.The reader sees where we were, and will be prepared, if he has a map (and any feelings), to appreciate the masterly strategy that followed.

II

During the pilgrimage everything does not suit the tastes of the pilgrim.--TURKISH PROVERB.