t the
least provocation.

Twelve miles from Baddeck we passed through the Barra Strait, or the
Grand Narrows, a picturesque feature in the Bras d'Or, and came into its
widest expanse. At the Narrows is a small settlement with a flag-staff
and a hotel, and roads leading to farmhouses on the hills. Here is a
Catholic chapel; and on shore a fat padre was waiting in his wagon
for the inevitable priest we always set ashore at such a place.
The missionary we landed was the young father from Arichat, and in
appearance the pleasing historical Jesuit. Slender is too corpulent a
word to describe his thinness, and his stature was primeval. Enveloped
in a black coat, the skirts of which reached his heels, and surmounted
by a black hat with an enormous brim, he had the form of an elegant
toadstool. The traveler is always grateful for such figures, and is not
disposed to quarrel with the faith which preserves so much of the ugly
picturesque. A peaceful farming country this, but an unremunerative
field, one would say, for the colporteur and the book-agent; and winter
must inclose it in a lonesome seclusion.

The only other thing of note the Bras d'Or offered us before we reached
West Bay was the finest show of medusm or jelly-fish that could be
produced. At first there were dozens of these disk-shaped, transparent
creatures, and then hundreds, starring the water like marguerites
sprinkled on a meadow, and of sizes from that of a teacup to a
dinner-plate. We soon ran into a school of them, a convention, a herd
as extensive as the vast buffalo droves on the plains, a collection as
thick as clover-blossoms in a field in June, miles of them, apparently;
and at length the boat had to push its way through a mass of them which
covered the water like the leaves of the pondlily, and filled the deeps
far down with their beautiful contracting and expanding forms. I did not
suppose there were so many jelly-fishes in all the world. What a repast
they would have made for the Atlantic whale we did not see, and what
inward comfort it would have given him to have swum through them once
or twice with open mouth! Our delight in this wondrous spectacle did
not prevent this generous wish for the gratification of the whale. It
is probably a natural human desire to see big corporations swallow up
little ones.

At the West Bay landing, where there is nothing whatever attractive,
we found a great concourse of country wagons and clamorous drivers, to
trans