aught but tradition remains of the beautiful village of Grand-Pre."

I sank back in the stage as it rolled down the mountain-road, and fairly
covered my eyes with my hands, as I repeated Webster's boast: "Thank God!
I too am an American." "But," said I, recovering, "thank God, I belong to
a State that has never bragged much of its great moral antecedents!" and
in that reflection I felt comforted, and the load on my back a little
lightened.

A few weeping willows, the never-failing relics of an Acadian settlement,
yet remain on the roadside; these, with the dykes and Great Prairie
itself, are the only memorials of a once happy people. The sun was just
sinking behind the Gasperau mountain as we entered the ancient village.
There was a smithy beside the stage-house, and we could see the dusky glow
of the forge within, and the swart mechanic

"Take in his leathern lap the hoof of the horse as a plaything,
Nailing the shoe in its place."

But it was not Basil the Blacksmith, nor one of his descendants, that held
the horse-hoof. The face of the smith was of the genuine New England type,
and just such faces as I saw everywhere in the village. In the shifting
panorama of the itinerary I suddenly found myself in a hundred-year-old
colony of genuine Yankees, the real true blues of Connecticut, quilted in
amidst the blue noses of Nova Scotia.

But of the poor Acadians not one remains now in the ancient village. It is
a solemn comment upon their peaceful and unrevengeful natures, that two
hundred settlers from Hew England remained unmolested upon their lands,
and that the descendants of those New England settlers now occupy them. A
solemn comment upon our history, and the touching epitaph of an
exterminated race.

Much as we may admire the various bays and lakes, the inlets,
promontories, and straits, the mountains and woodlands of this
rarely-visited corner of creation--and, compared with it, we can boast of
no coast scenery so beautiful--the valley of Grand-Pre transcends all the
rest in the Province. Only our valley of Wyoming, as an inland picture,
may match it, both in beauty and tradition. One has had its Gertrude, the
other its Evangeline. But Campbell never saw Wyoming, nor has Longfellow
yet visited the shores of the Basin of Minas. And I may venture to say,
neither poet has touched the key-note of divine anger which either story
might have awakened.

But let us be thankful for those simple and beautiful idy