Scores of these coves, cutting sharply into the pine-covered hills, notch the shores of St. Mary's Bay-coves lined with fishing-huts set askew on spindly pilings, where the men build their own smacks after the manner of their fathers and their grandfathers, and contrive these rude fish-wheels for hoisting up their daily catch when the tide drops low; and whence they set out each morning, fair weather or heavy, to sustain their lives on the gifts of a turbulent and ungenerous sea Weymouth town sleeps by the Sissiboo River, two miles inland from St. Mary's Bay, a place of ships and shingles. Industry has passed it by, but a more placid fortune lingers there. Time goes not so much by the calendar as by the table of the tides; for of what importance is it that the days drift easily one into another? But when the Westway, there at the foot of the street, will be able to make sail for Providence; when the ferry-boat from the ports across the bay can come puffing up-stream; when the fishing-boats will find enough water under their keels to go out after the day's haul of haddock and cod, there is another matter altogether Climb the Lookout, high above Wolfville, in the Land of Evangeline, and you may encounter these perennially youthful brothers, homeward bound from their daily search after the amethysts that hide in those rocky hills. The bearded one protested the sketch. "Why, you have made me look like an old man!" An old man? In years alone, my good sir Parrsboro, a good-natured, busy little town, with its crooked streets and its huddled roofs piled helter-skelter one above the other; with its screeching sawmills and straggling piles of freshly cut, good-smelling timber; with its schooners loading lumber for the States or the West Indies; with its own Ancient Mariner, who, at the age of one hundred and three, still jaunts down the main street daily to cast his appraising eye over the waterfront; and with its roving harbor, deep enough at flood tide to float a deeply loaded fourmaster, but retreating at low water a mile and a half into Minas Basin |