32

32

PROVINCIALISMS OF NOVA SCOTIA.

On the Sunday I attended service in the Episcopal church, and heard a sermon preached with a nasal twang so perfect that I guessed the preacher must be a Yankee. I was afterwards mortified to learn that he was a native of St John in New Brunswick; but I can honestly say for New England, that neither in the pulpit nor out of it did I meet, during my subsequent stay in the States, with any one so handy at speaking through his nose as this unhappy preacher of Annapolis.

The readers of Sam Slick naturally expect to hear many provincial expressions when they come to Nova Scotia. I was on the look-out for them; but whether it was that I did not fall in with any of the real blue-noses, or that the Queen's English is really better used than I had been led to expect, I scarcely heard a single peculiarity of expression during my stay in the province. Occasional guessings there were as to things which the guesser knew perfectly well-as when a man guessed his own age or his daughter's to be so-and-so, and the not unfrequent use of "admire " instead of "wonder at;" but what are these compared with our county provincialisms?

On Monday morning, the 13th of August, I embarked in the steamer for St John in New Brunswick. The weather was fine till we passed through the Digby Gut, and were fairly into the Bay of Fundy. A cross sea tossed us a little at the mouth of the gut, and by-andby the fogs, and finally the rains and gusts of this bay, assailed us. The steamer was a poor affair, and among other freight had some sheep on board, for which the farmers of the Cornwallis and Annapolis districts find a ready market at St John. The breadth of the passage is about forty-five miles, which we accomplished by four in the afternoon; when I landed at St John, and took up my quarters in the hotel.

CHAPTER II.

Area and population of New Brunswick.—The lumber-trade, its benefits and evils.—It retarded and discouraged farming. -Emigration caused by a crisis in this trade.-City of St John.-Diminution in its import trade and in the provincial revenue.-Apprehensions as to the ability of the province to sustain its population.-River St John.-Rich river flats.—Average produce of Queen's and Sunbury counties.-City of Fredericton.-Farm on the St John.-Intervale land, its different qualities and values.-Emigration fever.-Indian corn as a fodder crop in England.—Opinion as to farming with paid labour.-Woodstock.—Quality and value of land in its neighbourhood.—Exhausting culture of first settlers. Farming on Shares. Charivari of the Mickeys of Woodstock.- Farm at Jacksontown. — Speculators in land.-Iron ore and iron smelting.-Itinerant lecturers.-Mouths of the Tobique and Aroostook rivers.-Potato breakfasts and meals in common.-Sowing of winter wheat on newly cleared land only.Rust and wheat fly, remedy for.-Mellicete Indians on the Tobique. -Irish settlement and thriving settlers. - Healthiness of the pro

vince.-Grand falls and town of Colebrook.

BEFORE my departure from England, I had been invited by the Governor and House of Assembly of New Brunswick to visit that province, with the view of drawing up a report, to be presented to his Excellency and the Legislature, in reference to its agricultural capabilities. I had undertaken this task without very clearly understanding the nature of the duty, or of the country, and in the hope that it would not seriously interfere with my other plans in visiting the American continent. On my arrival, however, I very soon found that the extent of the province,

VOL. I.

34

TRANSITION STATE OF NEW BRUNSWICK.

and the slow rate of travelling, would compel me to devote some months longer to the work than I had originally anticipated; and, in order to complete it, I was subsequently compelled to delay, to a future opportunity, my intended visit to the more southern and westernly portions of the American Union.

The commercial, and I may say the entire internal and social condition of the province of New Brunswick, is in a transition state; and as all transitions occasion embarrassment and distress more or less general, wherever they occur, it has been the fate of this province to suffer a temporary check in its progress, in consequence of this transitionary state of things.

New Brunswick contains an area of eighteen millions of acres, of which about five millions are at present unfit for agricultural purposes. Its population is estimated at two hundred and ten thousand. With twice the geographical extent of the province of Nova Scotia, it has still a population about one-third less. It is therefore in a considerable less advanced condition than the latter province. Indeed, it was not till 1784 that it was separated from Nova Scotia, and formed into a distinct government.

The earliest inland trade of these northern provinces was confined in a great measure to the purchase, by way of barter, of the furs of wild animals collected by the native Indians in their hunting excursions. Next, and as settlers increased, the timber, or lumber trade as it is called, sprang up, and an apparently inexhaustible article of export was drawn from the boundless forests which stretched uninterruptedly over the entire surface of the province. The cutting of the trees, and the haulage and floating of them down the rivers, gave healthy employment to many men; the raising food for these men called agricultural industry into play; the export of the timber employed shipping, and afforded the means of paying for the British manufactures and West India produce

VICISSITUDES IN THE LUMBER TRADE.

35

imported in return; while the profits of the merchants erected towns and public buildings, improved harbours and internal communications, tempted foreign capital into the province, and generally sustained and carried it forward to its actual condition.

But, like other branches of industry, the lumber trade has always had its periods of activity and depression. When the demand was brisk and prices good, the trade was pushed eagerly forward; lumberers went into the woods by droves, and timber was shipped to England in quantities which over-loaded the market. Prices in consequence fell—those who were obliged to realise were compelled to sacrifice capital as well as profit; and thus mercantile crises, and many failures, periodically occurred among the colonial merchants. It was the over-trading of our own manufacturers in another form. The merchants of St John and the other lumbering ports were subject to these vicissitudes, not from any interference of home regulations, but through excessive individual competition among themselves. Still, on the whole the colonies gained, though many individuals were constantly suffering. And if home capital was lost to those who embarked it, it was a gain to the colony, inasmuch as it had been expended in paying for colonial labour, by which, directly or indirectly, colonial land had been cleared and prepared for the plough.

But such an export trade in the large could only be temporary. Land cleared of timber does not soon cover itself again with a new growth of merchantable trees. Every year carried the scene of the woodmen's labours farther up the main rivers, and into more remote creeks and tributaries, adding to the labour of procuring and to the cost of the logs when brought to the place of shipment. Hence, prices must rise at home, or profits must decline in the colony, and the trade gradually lessen. All these had already taken place to a certain extent,

26.

FORMATION AND FILLING UP

miles. The northern ridge consists of trap, resting upon a red sandstone, and forms the southern boundary of the Bay of Fundy. The southern ridge, called the South Mountains, consists of granite and of, more or less, metamorphic (Silurian and Cambrian) slates. The surface of the former has been crumbled by the action of the weather sufficiently to form over the greater part of the North Mountains a considerable depth of soil, which, like that of so many other trap rocks, is said by Dr Gesner to be rich and fertile. The granites and slates of the South Mountains have in general been slowly acted upon by the weather, and have unwillingly produced poor and scanty soils.

Between these ridges runs a long valley, widening towards the Bay of Minas, and affording at that extremity a larger expansion for the fertile alluvials of Cornwallis and Horton. In this valley lies, or formerly lay, a red sandstone deposit—that which still dips beneath the trap of the North Mountains-resting probably on some of the softer slates of the Silurian age.

In the drift period, when the whole of this country was submerged, the northern current, of which we have so many traces in these countries, rushing between the two lofty ridges of hard rock, scooped out the softer and less coherent red sandstones and marls and softer slates, and produced the existing valley, which, like the Bay of Fundy —a wider and longer excavation-has a north-east and south-westerly course.

And now, when the land was elevated to the existing level, the tides began to act as at present upon the Bay of Fundy, and to run round either end of the North Mountains, which, from Cape Blomedon to the Digby Gut, formed a long narrow island, having the Bay of Fundy on one side and the Strait of Annapolis on the other.

But the natural entrance of the tide into the strait