Chapter 2

"The Lord only knows," was the utterly candid response; but then, forgetting everything in her last misfortune and impelled to a burst of confidence, she began to tell me her troubles. She informed me that her youngest daughter was about to be married, and that all her wedding-clothes and all her summer clothes were in that trunk; and as she said this she gave a glance out of the window as if she hoped it might be following her. What would become of them all now, all brand new, she did n't know, nor what would become of her or her daughter. And then she told me, article by article and piece by piece, all that that trunk contained, the very names of which had an unfamiliar sound in a railway-car, and how many sets and pairs there were of each. It seemed to be a relief to the old lady to make public this catalogue which filled all her mind; and there was a pathos in the revelation that I cannot convey in words. And though I am compelled, by way of illustration, to give this incident, no bribery or torture shall ever extract from me a statement of the contents of that hair trunk.

We were now passing Nahant, and we should have seen Longfellow's cottage and the waves beating on the rocks before it, if we had been near enough. As it was, we could only faintly distinguish the headland and note the white beach of Lynn. The fact is, that in travel one is almost as much dependent upon imagination and memory as he is at home. Somehow, we seldom get near enough to anything. The interest of all this coast which we had come to inspect was mainly literary and historical. And no country is of much interest until legends and poetry have draped it in hues that mere nature cannot produce. We looked at Nahant for Longfellow's sake; we strained our eyes to make out Marblehead on account of Whittier's ballad; we scrutinized the entrance to Salem Harbor because a genius once sat in its decaying custom-house and made of it a throne of the imagination. Upon this low shore line, which lies blinking in the midday sun, the waves of history have beaten for two centuries and a half, and romance has had time to grow there. Out of any of these coves might have sailed Sir Patrick Spens "to Noroway, to Noroway,"

"They hadna sailed upon the sea A day but barely three,

Till loud and boisterous grew the wind, And gurly grew the sea."

The sea was anything but gurly now; it lay idle and shining in an August holiday. It seemed as if we could sit all day and watch the suggestive shore and dream about it. But we could not. No man, and few women, can sit all day on those little round penitential stools that the company provide for the discomfort of their passengers. There is no scenery in the world that can be enjoyed from one of those stools. And when the traveler is at sea, with the land failing away in his horizon, and has to create his own scenery by an effort of the imagination, these stools are no assistance to him. The imagination, when one is sitting, will not work unless the back is supported. Besides, it began to be cold; notwithstanding the shiny, specious appearance of things, it was cold, except in a sheltered nook or two where the sun beat. This was nothing to be complained of by persons who had left the parching land in order to get cool. They knew that there would be a wind and a draught everywhere, and that they would be occupied nearly all the time in moving the little stools about to get out of the wind, or out of the sun, or out of something that is inherent in a steamboat. Most people enjoy riding on a steamboat, shaking and trembling and chow-chowing along in pleasant weather out of sight of land; and they do not feel any ennui, as may be inferred from the intense excitement which seizes them when a poor porpoise leaps from the water half a mile away. "Did you see the porpoise?" makes conversation for an hour. On our steamboat there was a man who said he saw a whale, saw him just as plain, off to the east, come up to blow; appeared to be a young one. I wonder where all these men come from who always see a whale. I never was on a sea-steamer yet that there was not one of these men.

We sailed from Boston Harbor straight for Cape Ann, and passed close by the twin lighthouses of Thacher, so near that we could see the lanterns and the stone gardens, and the young barbarians of Thacher all at play; and then we bore away, straight over the trackless Atlantic, across that part of the map where the title and the publisher's name are usually printed, for the foreign city of St. John. It was after we passed these lighthouses that we did n't see the whale, and began to regret the hard fate that took us away from a view of the Isles of Shoals. I am not tempted to introduce them into this sketch, much as its surface needs their romantic color, for truth is stronger in me than the love of giving a deceitful pleasure. There will be nothing in this record that we did not see, or might not have seen. For instance, it might not be wrong to describe a coast, a town, or an island that we passed while we were performing our morning toilets in our staterooms. The traveler owes a duty to his readers, and if he is now and then too weary or too indifferent to go out from the cabin to survey a prosperous village where a landing is made, he has no right to cause the reader to suffer by his indolence. He should describe the village.

I had intended to describe the Maine coast, which is as fascinating on the map as that of Norway. We had all the feelings appropriate to nearness to it, but we couldn't see it. Before we came abreast of it night had settled down, and there was around us only a gray and melancholy waste of salt water. To be sure it was a lovely night, with a young moon in its sky,

"I saw the new moon late yestreen Wi' the auld moon in her arms,"

and we kept an anxious lookout for the Maine hills that push so boldly down into the sea. At length we saw them,--faint, dusky shadows in the horizon, looming up in an ashy color and with a most poetical light. We made out clearly Mt. Desert, and felt repaid for our journey by the sight of this famous island, even at such a distance. I pointed out the hills to the man at the wheel, and asked if we should go any nearer to Mt. Desert.

"Them!" said he, with the merited contempt which officials in this country have for inquisitive travelers,--"them's Camden Hills. You won't see Mt. Desert till midnight, and then you won't."

One always likes to weave in a little romance with summer travel on a steamboat; and we came aboard this one with the purpose and the language to do so. But there was an absolute want of material, that would hardly be credited if we went into details. The first meeting of the passengers at the dinner-table revealed it. There is a kind of female plainness which is pathetic, and many persons can truly say that to them it is homelike; and there are vulgarities of manner that are interesting; and there are peculiarities, pleasant or the reverse, which attract one's attention: but there was absolutely nothing of this sort on our boat. The female passengers were all neutrals, incapable, I should say, of making any impression whatever even under the most favorable circumstances. They were probably women of the Provinces, and took their neutral tint from the foggy land they inhabit, which is neither a republic nor a monarchy, but merely a languid expectation of something undefined. My comrade was disposed to resent the dearth of beauty, not only on this vessel but throughout the Provinces generally,--a resentment that could be shown to be unjust, for this was evidently not the season for beauty in these lands, and it was probably a bad year for it. Nor should an American of the United States be forward to set up his standard of taste in such matters; neither in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, nor Cape Breton have I heard the inhabitants complain of the plainness of the women.

On such a night two lovers might have been seen, but not on our boat, leaning over the taffrail,--if that is the name of the fence around the cabin-deck, looking at the moon in the western sky and the long track of light in the steamer's wake with unutterable tenderness. For the sea was perfectly smooth, so smooth as not to interfere with the most perfect tenderness of feeling; and the vessel forged ahead under the stars of the soft night with an adventurous freedom that almost concealed the commercial nature of her mission. It seemed --this voyaging through the sparkling water, under the scintillating heavens, this resolute pushing into the opening splendors of night --like a pleasure trip. "It is the witching hour of half past ten," said my comrade, "let us turn in." (The reader will notice the consideration for her feelings which has omitted the usual description of "a sunset at sea.")

When we looked from our state-room window in the morning we saw land. We were passing within a stone's throw of a pale-green and rather cold-looking coast, with few trees or other evidences of fertile soil. Upon going out I found that we were in the harbor of Eastport. I found also the usual tourist who had been up, shivering in his winter overcoat, since four o'clock. He described to me the magnificent sunrise, and the lifting of the fog from islands and capes, in language that made me rejoice that he had seen it. He knew all about the harbor. That wooden town at the foot of it, with the white spire, was Lubec; that wooden town we were approaching was Eastport. The long island stretching clear across the harbor was Campobello. We had been obliged to go round it, a dozen miles out of our way, to get in, because the tide was in such a stage that we could not enter by the Lubec Channel. We had been obliged to enter an American harbor by British waters.

We approached Eastport with a great deal of curiosity and considerable respect. It had been one of the cities of the imagination. Lying in the far east of our great territory, a military and even a sort of naval station, a conspicuous name on the map, prominent in boundary disputes and in war operations, frequent in telegraphic dispatches,--we had imagined it a solid city, with some Oriental, if decayed, peculiarity, a port of trade and commerce. The tourist informed me that Eastport looked very well at a distance, with the sun shining on its white houses. When we landed at its wooden dock we saw that it consisted of a few piles of lumber, a sprinkling of small cheap houses along a sidehill, a big hotel with a flag-staff, and a very peaceful looking arsenal. It is doubtless a very enterprising and deserving city, but its aspect that morning was that of cheapness, newness, and stagnation, with no compensating picturesqueness. White paint always looks chilly under a gray sky and on naked hills. Even in hot August the place seemed bleak. The tourist, who went ashore with a view to breakfast, said that it would be a good place to stay in and go a-fishing and picnicking on Campobello Island. It has another advantage for the wicked over other Maine towns. Owing to the contiguity of British territory, the Maine Law is constantly evaded, in spirit. The thirsty citizen or sailor has only to step into a boat and give it a shove or two across the narrow stream that separates the United States from Deer Island and land, when he can ruin his breath, and return before he is missed.

This might be a cause of war with, England, but it is not the most serious grievance here. The possession by the British of the island of Campobello is an insufferable menace and impertinence. I write with the full knowledge of what war is. We ought to instantly dislodge the British from Campobello. It entirely shuts up and commands our harbor, one of our chief Eastern harbors and war stations, where we keep a flag and cannon and some soldiers, and where the customs officers look out for smuggling. There is no way to get into our own harbor, except in favorable conditions of the tide, without begging the courtesy of a passage through British waters. Why is England permitted to stretch along down our coast in this straggling and inquisitive manner? She might almost as well own Long Island. It was impossible to prevent our cheeks mantling with shame as we thought of this, and saw ourselves, free American citizens, land-locked by alien soil in our own harbor.

We ought to have war, if war is necessary to possess Campobello and Deer Islands; or else we ought to give the British Eastport. I am not sure but the latter would be the better course.

With this war spirit in our hearts, we sailed away into the British waters of the Bay of Fundy, but keeping all the morning so close to the New Brunswick shore that we could see there was nothing on it; that is, nothing that would make one wish to land. And yet the best part of going to sea is keeping close to the shore, however tame it may be, if the weather is pleasant. A pretty bay now and then, a rocky cove with scant foliage, a lighthouse, a rude cabin, a level land, monotonous and without noble forests,--this was New Brunswick as we coasted along it under the most favorable circumstances. But we were advancing into the Bay of Fundy; and my comrade, who had been brought up on its high tides in the district school, was on the lookout for this phenomenon. The very name of Fundy is stimulating to the imagination, amid the geographical wastes of youth, and the young fancy reaches out to its tides with an enthusiasm that is given only to Fingal's Cave and other pictorial wonders of the text-book. I am sure the district schools would become what they are not now, if the geographers would make the other parts of the globe as attractive as the sonorous Bay of Fundy. The recitation about that is always an easy one; there is a lusty pleasure in the mere shouting out of the name, as if the speaking it were an innocent sort of swearing. From the Bay of Fundy the rivers run uphill half the time, and the tides are from forty to ninety feet high. For myself, I confess that, in my imagination, I used to see the tides of this bay go stalking into the land like gigantic waterspouts; or, when I was better instructed, I could see them advancing on the coast like a solid wall of masonry eighty feet high. "Where," we said, as we came easily, and neither uphill nor downhill, into the pleasant harbor of St. John,---"where are the tides of our youth?"

They were probably out, for when we came to the land we walked out upon the foot of a sloping platform that ran into the water by the side of the piles of the dock, which stood up naked and blackened high in the air. It is not the purpose of this paper to describe St. John, nor to dwell upon its picturesque situation. As one approaches it from the harbor it gives a promise which its rather shabby streets, decaying houses, and steep plank sidewalks do not keep. A city set on a hill, with flags flying from a roof here and there, and a few shining spires and walls glistening in the sun, always looks well at a distance. St. John is extravagant in the matter of flagstaffs; almost every well-to-do citizen seems to have one on his premises, as a sort of vent for his loyalty, I presume. It is a good fashion, at any rate, and its more general adoption by us would add to the gayety of our cities when we celebrate the birthday of the President. St. John is built on a steep sidehill, from which it would be in danger of sliding off, if its houses were not mortised into the solid rock. This makes the house-foundations secure, but the labor of blasting out streets is considerable. We note these things complacently as we toil in the sun up the hill to the Victoria Hotel, which stands well up on the backbone of the ridge, and from the upper windows of which we have a fine view of the harbor, and of the hill opposite, above Carleton, where there is the brokenly truncated ruin of a round stone tower. This tower was one of the first things that caught our eyes as we entered the harbor. It gave an antique picturesqueness to 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 simply intolerable. Had we not told everybody that we were going to Baddeck? Now, if we had gone to Shediac in the train that left St. John that morning, we should have taken the steamboat that would have carried us to Port Hawkesbury, whence a stage connected with a steamboat on the Bras d'Or, which (with all this profusion of relative pronouns) would land us at Baddeck on Friday. How many times had we been over this route on the map and the prospectus of travel! And now, what a delusion it seemed! There would not another boat leave Shediac on this route till the following Tuesday,--quite too late for our purpose. The reader sees where we were, and will be prepared, if he has a map (and any feelings), to appreciate the masterly strategy that followed.

II

During the pilgrimage everything does not suit the tastes of the pilgrim.--TURKISH PROVERB.

One seeking Baddeck, as a possession, would not like to be detained a prisoner even in Eden,--much less in St. John, which is unlike Eden in several important respects. The tree of knowledge does not grow there, for one thing; at least St. John's ignorance of Baddeck amounts to a feature. This encountered us everywhere. So dense was this ignorance, that we, whose only knowledge of the desired place was obtained from the prospectus of travel, came to regard ourselves as missionaries of geographical information in this dark provincial city.

The clerk at the Victoria was not unwilling to help us on our journey, but if he could have had his way, we would have gone to a place on Prince Edward Island which used to be called Bedeque, but is now named Summerside, in the hope of attracting summer visitors. As to Cape Breton, he said the agent of the Intercolonial could tell us all about that, and put us on the route. We repaired to the agent. The kindness of this person dwells in our memory. He entered at once into our longings and perplexities. He produced his maps and time-tables, and showed us clearly what we already knew. The Port Hawkesbury steamboat from Shediac for that week had gone, to be sure, but we could take one of another line which would leave us at Pictou, whence we could take another across to Port Hood, on Cape Breton. This looked fair, until we showed the agent that there was no steamer to Port Hood.

"Ah, then you can go another way. You can take the Intercolonial railway round to Pictou, catch the steamer for Port Hawkesbury, connect with the steamer on the Bras d'Or, and you are all right."

So it would seem. It was a most obliging agent; and it took us half an hour to convince him that the train would reach Pictou half a day too late for the steamer, that no other boat would leave Pictou for Cape Breton that week, and that even if we could reach the Bras d'Or, we should have no means of crossing it, except by swimming. The perplexed agent thereupon referred us to Mr. Brown, a shipper on the wharf, who knew all about Cape Breton, and could tell us exactly how to get there. It is needless to say that a weight was taken off our minds. We pinned our faith to Brown, and sought him in his warehouse. Brown was a prompt business man, and a traveler, and would know every route and every conveyance from Nova Scotia to Cape Breton.

Mr. Brown was not in. He never is in. His store is a rusty warehouse, low and musty, piled full of boxes of soap and candles and dried fish, with a little glass cubby in one corner, where a thin clerk sits at a high desk, like a spider in his web. Perhaps he is a spider, for the cubby is swarming with flies, whose hum is the only noise of traffic; the glass of the window-sash has not been washed since it was put in apparently. The clerk is not writing, and has evidently no other use for his steel pen than spearing flies. Brown is out, says this young votary of commerce, and will not be in till half past five. We remark upon the fact that nobody ever is "in" these dingy warehouses, wonder when the business is done, and go out into the street to wait for Brown.

In front of the store is a dray, its horse fast-asleep, and waiting for the revival of commerce. The travelers note that the dray is of a peculiar construction, the body being dropped down from the axles so as nearly to touch the ground,--a great convenience in loading and unloading; they propose to introduce it into their native land. The dray is probably waiting for the tide to come in. In the deep slip lie a dozen helpless vessels, coasting schooners mostly, tipped on their beam ends in the mud, or propped up by side-pieces as if they were built for land as well as for water. At the end of the wharf is a long English steamboat unloading railroad iron, which will return to the Clyde full of Nova Scotia coal. We sit down on the dock, where the fresh sea-breeze comes up the harbor, watch the lazily swinging crane on the vessel, and meditate upon the greatness of England and the peacefulness of the drowsy after noon. One's feeling of rest is never complete--unless he can see somebody else at work, --but the labor must be without haste, as it is in the Provinces.

While waiting for Brown, we had leisure to explore the shops of King's Street, and to climb up to the grand triumphal arch which stands on top of the hill and guards the entrance to King's Square.