Acadia or, A Month with the Blue Noses. Frederic S. Cozzens
can't do anything with them, they won't work. There they are in their cabins, just as you see them, a poor, woe-begone set of vagabonds; a burden upon the community; of no use to themselves, nor to anybody else."
"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, here in his happy valley."
"Now then," said my companion, as this trite quotation was passing through my mind. The wagon had stopped in front of a little, weather-beaten house that kept watch and ward over an acre of greensward, broken ever and anon with a projecting bone of granite, and not only fenced with stone, but dotted also with various mounds of pebbles, some as large as a paving-stone, and some much larger. This was "Deer's Castle." In front of the castle was a swing-sign with an inscription:
"William Deer, who lives here,
Keeps the best of wine and beer,
Brandy, and cider, and other good cheer;
Fish, and ducks, and moose, and deer.
Caught or shot in the woods just here,
With cutlets, or steaks, as will appear;
If you will stop you need not fear
But you will be well treated by William Deer,
And by Mrs. Deer, his dearest, deary dear!"
I quote from memory. The precise words have escaped me, but the above is the substance of the sense, and the metre is accurate.
It was a little, weather-beaten shanty of boards, that clung like flakes to the frame-work. A show-box of a room, papered with select wood-cuts from Punch and the Illustrated London News, was the grand banquet-hall of the castle. And indeed it was a castle compared with the wretched redoubts of poverty around it. Here we changed horses, or rather we exchanged our horse, for a diminutive, bantam pony, that, under the supervision of "Bill," was put inside the shafts and buckled up to the very roots of the harness. This Bill, the son and heir of the Castellen, was a good-natured yellow boy, about fifteen years of age, with such a development of under-lip and such a want of development elsewhere, that his head looked like a scoop. There was an infinite fund of humor in Billy, an uncontrollable sense of the comic, that would break out in spite of his grave endeavors to put himself under guard. It exhibited itself in his motions and gestures, in the flourish of his hands as he buckled up the pony, in the looseness of his gait, the swing of his head, and the roll of his eyes. His very language was pregnant with mirth; thus:
"Bill!"
"Cheh, cheh, sir? cheh."
"Is your father at home?"
"Cheh, cheh, father? cheh, cheh."
"Yes, your father?"
"Cheh, cheh, at home, sah? cheh."
"Yes, is your father at home?"
"I guess so, cheh, cheh."
"What is the matter with you, Bill? what are you laughing about?"
"Cheh, cheh, I don't know, sah, cheh, cheh."
"Well, take out the horse, and put in the pony; we want to go to Chizzencook."
"Cheh, Cheh'z'ncook? Yes, sah," and so with that facetious gait and droll twist of the elbow, Bill swings himself against the horse and unbuckles him in a perpetual jingle of merriment.
"And this," said I to my companion, as we looked from the door-step of the shanty upon the spiry tops of evergreens in the valley below us, and at the wretched log-huts that were roosting up on the bare rocks around us, "this is the negro settlement?"
"Yes," he replied.
"Are all the negro settlements in Nova Scotia as miserable, as this?"
"Yes," he answered; "you can tell a negro settlement at once by its appearance."
"Then," I thought to myself, "I would, for poor Cuffee's sake, that much-vaunted British sympathy and British philanthropy had something better to show to an admiring world than the prospect around Deer's Castle."
Notwithstanding the very generous banquet spread before the eyes of the traveller, on the sign-board, we were compelled to dismiss the pleasant fiction of the poet upon the announcement of Mrs. Deer, that "Nathin was in de house 'cept bacon," and she "reckoned" she "might have an egg or two by de time we got back from Chizzincook."
"But you have plenty of trout here in these streams?"
"Oh! yes, plenty, sah."
"Then let Bill catch some trout for us."
And so the pony being strapped up and buckled to the wagon, we left the negro settlement for the French settlement. They are all in "settlements," here, the people of this Province. Centuries are mutable, but prejudices never alter in the Colonies.
But we are again in the Acadian forest—a truce to moralizing—let us enjoy the scenery. The road we are on is but a few miles from the sea-shore, but the ocean is hidden from view by the thick woods. As we ride along, however, we skirt the edges of coves and inlets that frequently break in upon the landscape. There is a chain of fresh-water lakes also along this road; sometimes we cross a bridge over a rushing torrent; sometimes a calm expanse of water, doubling the evergreens at its margin, comes in view; anon a gleam of sapphire strikes through the verdure, and an ocean-bay with its shingly beach curves in and out between the piny slopes. At last we reach the crest of a hill, and at the foot of the road is another bridge, a house, a wharf, and two or three coasters at anchor in a diminutive harbor. This is "Three Fathom Harbor." We are within a mile of Chezzetcook.
Now if it were not for Pony we should press on to the settlement, but we must give Pony a respite. Pony is an enthusiastic little fellow, but his lungs are too much for him, they have blown him out like a bagpipe. A mile farther and then eleven miles back to Deer's Castle, is a great undertaking for so small an animal. In the meanwhile, we will ourselves rest and take some "home-brewed" with the landlord, who is harbor-master, inn-keeper, store-keeper, fisherman, shipper, skipper, mayor, and corporation of Three Fathom Harbor, beside being father of the town, for all the children in it are his own. A draught of foaming ale, a whiff or two from a clay pipe, a look out of the window to be assured that Pony had subsided, and we take leave of the corporate authority of Three Fathom Harbor, and are once more on the road.
One can scarcely draw near to a settlement of these poor refugees without a feeling of pity for the sufferings they have endured; and this spark of pity quickly warms and kindles into indignation when we think of the story of hapless Acadia—the grievous wrong done those simple-minded, harmless, honest people, by the rapacious, free-booting adventurers of merry England, and those precious filibusters, our Pilgrim Fathers.
The early explorations of the French in the young hemisphere which Columbus had revealed to the older half of the world, have been almost entirely obscured by the greater events which followed. Nearly a century after the first colonies were established in New France, New England was discovered. I shall not dwell upon the importance of this event, as it has been so often alluded to by historians and others; and, indeed, I believe it is generally acknowledged now, that the finding of the continent itself would have been a failure had it not been for the discovery of Massachusetts. As this, however, happened long after the establishment of Acadia, and as the Pilgrim Fathers did not interfere with their French neighbors for a surprising length of time, it will be as well not to expatiate upon it at present. In the course of a couple of centuries or so, I shall have occasion to allude to it, in connection with the story of the neutral French.
In the year 1504, says the Chronicle, some fishermen from Brittany discovered the island that now forms the eastern division of Nova Scotia, and named it "Cape Breton." Two years after, Dennys of Harfleur, made a rude chart of the vast sheet of water that stretches from Cape Breton and Newfoundland to the mainland. In 1534, Cartier, sailing under the orders of the French Admiral, Chabot, visited the coast of Newfoundland, crossed the gulf Dennys had seen