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, however, 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 simp