chools, and the examination-papers of Maud and her elder sister would
do credit to Boston scholars even. You would not say that the place
was stuffed with books, or overrun by lecturers, but it is an orderly,
Sabbath-keeping, fairly intelligent town. Book-agents visit it with
other commercial travelers, but the flood of knowledge, which is said
to be the beginning of sorrow, is hardly turned in that direction yet.
I heard of a feeble lecture-course in Halifax, supplied by local
celebrities, some of them from St. John; but so far as I can see, this
is a virgin field for the platform philosophers under whose instructions
we have become the well-informed people we are.

The peaceful jail and the somewhat tiresome church exhaust one's
opportunities for doing good in Baddeck on Sunday. There seemed to be no
idlers about, to reprove; the occasional lounger on the skeleton wharves
was in his Sunday clothes, and therefore within the statute. No one,
probably, would have thought of rowing out beyond the island to fish for
cod,--although, as that fish is ready to bite, and his associations
are more or less sacred, there might be excuses for angling for him
on Sunday, when it would be wicked to throw a line for another sort of
fish. My earliest recollections are of the codfish on the meeting-house
spires in New England,--his sacred tail pointing the way the wind went.
I did not know then why this emblem should be placed upon a house of
worship, any more than I knew why codfish-balls appeared always upon the
Sunday breakfast-table. But these associations invested this plebeian
fish with something of a religious character, which he has never quite
lost, in my mind.

Having attributed the quiet of Baddeck on Sunday to religion, we did not
know to what to lay the quiet on Monday. But its peacefulness continued.
I have no doubt that the farmers began to farm, and the traders to
trade, and the sailors to sail; but the tourist felt that he had come
into a place of rest. The promise of the red sky the evening before was
fulfilled in another royal day. There was an inspiration in the air that
one looks for rather in the mountains than on the sea-coast; it seemed
like some new and gentle compound of sea-air and land-air, which was the
perfection of breathing material. In this atmosphere, which seemed to
flow over all these Atlantic isles at this season, one endures a great
deal of exertion with little fatigue; or he is content to sit still,