country
could match the tides of the Bay of Fundy. He loved and he sang of her
streams and her valleys, her woods and her wild-flowers, most of all of
the 'Mayflower,' the trailing arbutus of early spring, with its fresh
pink petals and its wonderful fragrance, long since adopted as the
provincial emblem. After more than one political fight he retired to
the country for a month or for a year, and there let nature breathe
into his soul her beauty and her calm. Of one such occasion he wrote:
'For a month I did nothing but play with the children and read old
books to my girls. I then went into the woods and called moose with
the old hunters, camping out night after night, listening to their
stories, calming my thoughts with the perfect stillness of the forest,
and forgetting the bitterness of conflict amid the beauties of nature.'

But while he was thus the child of Nova Scotia, he was her creator as
well. Early Nova Scotia was rather a collection of scattered little
settlements than a province. To Howe, in great measure, she owed her
unity.

{4}

The first settlements in the Acadian peninsula were made by the French,
in the fertile diked lands at the head of the Bay of Fundy. To the
number of six thousand these Acadians were driven out on the eve of the
Seven Years' War, a tragedy told of in Longfellow's _Evangeline_. In
after years many of them crept back to different parts of their beloved
province, and little settlements here and there, from Pubnico in the
south to Cheticamp in the north-west, still speak the speech of Old
France.

In 1713 the province became British, and in 1749 Halifax was founded by
the British government. From this time on, bands of emigrants from
various countries settled in districts often widely separated, and
established rude farming and fishing communities, very largely
self-contained. Howe knew and loved them all. In one of his speeches
he thus sketched the process: 'A small band of English adventurers,
under Cornwallis, laid the foundation of Halifax. These, at a critical
moment, were reinforced by the Loyalist emigration, which flowed into
our western counties and laid broad and deep the foundation of their
prosperity. A few hardy emigrants from the old colonies and their {5}
descendants built up the maritime county of Yarmouth. Two men of that
stock first discovered the value of Locke's Island, the commercial
centre of East Shelburne. A few hundreds of sturdy Germans