CHAPTER VI
GRAND PRÉ AND EVANGELINE
One of the pleasantest features of New Scotland is the number and variety of its wild-flowers. Outside the dwellings in “the Valley” one’s eye constantly met with and was refreshed by the sight of the white rose. The woods are full of violets. The ponds and marshes reek with perfume and colour, I shall never forget the advent at each station on the line of half-a-dozen vociferous urchins bearing bunches of long-stemmed water lilies. “Pond lilies—fresh picked pond lilies. Fifteen cents a bunch!” Behind this youth came another, at an interval of five paces. “Beautiful fresh pond lilies. Ten cents a bunch.” And still another. “Pond lilies, five cents a bunch.” The train was about to move. “All aboard!” shouted the conductor. The flower merchants showed a sudden parity and unanimity in their demands. “Pond lilies—five a bunch,” they cried in chorus. Then, as the train began to move, one small boy, rather pale and bright-eyed, looking as if his chief and favourite nutriment were chewing-gum,[5]
[5] Of this delectable composition, one of those blessings which, like the phonograph and the sky-scraper, the world owes to America, the variety now most in vogue is called, for some mysterious reason known to its maker “chiclets.” A waiter at the Halifax Hotel informed me that an English lady had ordered a pair of “chiclets”—broiled—for luncheon, under the impression that it was the poultry par excellence of the country, like Maryland squab or reed birds.
looked up into my face, extended his scented wares under my very nose, and blurted out breathlessly: “Here, take ’em, mister. Beautiful and fresh. Two bunches for five!”
I tossed him a coin, but my journey was long, the cars were crowded, and the dank and dripping lilies would have been an embarrassment; so I left them in his hands. But they were very beautiful; and there is no scent in all the world for me—save the scent of lilac—so pregnant with charm, so redolent of poetry unwritten.
But the water-lily is not the flower of the Province. That is the sweet scented, rich-hued trailing arbutus—the far-famed Mayflower, so rare in other parts of Canada, here so plentiful that it has become the emblem of New Scotland, from which is derived the poetic and significant motto of the Province: “We bloom amid the snows.” No flower is so popular. One commonly meets with large parties of young people in the woods, in quest of the Mayflower; they are worn in corsage and button-hole, or carried as a bouquet in the hand by shoppers and pedestrians. The country people, Acadians, Indians, and Negroes, gather them into little bunches and bring them to market, or hawk them about the capital. So that, while it is in season, it is all-pervasive in drawing-room, parlour window, and office. So jealous are the Nova Scotians of their prior rights in this flower that a decade since, impelled by the claims of the Massachusetts folk, who seem somehow to have confounded the blossom with the name of that truly Leviathan ship the Mayflower, which bore thither the Pilgrim Fathers, that they passed in legislature “An Act respecting the Floral Emblem of Nova Scotia. Edward, Sect. 1, cap. x.,” which duly sets forth their priority for all future generations.
Speaking of the vessel of the Pilgrim Fathers, a gentleman at Liverpool, who showed me a piece of her timbers, a cherished heirloom in the family, said:
“There never was a ship like the Mayflower, or an instance which so shows the untrustworthiness of contemporary testimony. We know her now to have been one of the marine wonders of the seventeenth century, far larger than the Lusitania or the Mauretania, or any modern ship. To find her equal we must go back to Noah’s Ark, unless, indeed, the Royal George, which survives to-day in the form of at least a million chairs, tables, wardrobes, and settees, were larger. The mere fact that she carried over a thousand families, including many of Irish and German origin, is a proof of her dimensions!”
Westward from Windsor, on the edge of the Basin of Minas, lies the great marsh meadow—Grand Pré—a district over which the genius of a poet has thrown a film of magic, making it, even at noonday, a region of perpetual twilight. It is strange to think that in Haliburton’s day, Grand Pré, unheard of as a village, was merely the Grand Prairie situated in Horton township, and that Evangeline had never been heard of. Crossing the Avon, one is confronted with a range of hills called the Horton Mountains. The view from the roadway on the summit is unmatched in Nova Scotia. It includes four counties, including the thousands of acres of marsh meadow reclaimed by the Acadians. Before one’s eyes stretch the verdant and populous vales of the Gaspereaux and Cornwallis, with their wooded groves and tilled fields: the waters of five rivers may be seen flowing into the basin. Travellers are fond of comparing it to the valley of the Dee, near Aberdeen, but that view lacks the wondrous Cape Blomidon, a majestic promontory 670 feet high, which forms the abrupt eastern termination of the North Mountain chain.
Where Blomidon’s blue crest looks down upon the valley land.
How many poets have seen and sung of Blomidon and Grand Pré? But one may see with the eye of the mind and with the eye of the body, and the best description of the district is still that of the poet who himself never set foot in Acadia.
“... Vast meadows stretched to the eastward,
Giving the village its name and pasture to flocks without number;
Dikes that the hands of the farmers had raised with labour incessant,
Shut out the turbulent waves; but at stated seasons the flood-gates
Opened and welcomed the sea, to wander at will o’er the meadows.
West and South there were fields of flax and orchards and corn-fields,
Spreading afar and unfenced o’er the plain; and away to the northward
Blomidon rose, and the forests old, and aloft on the mountains
Sea-fogs pitched their tents, and mists from the mighty Atlantic
Looked on the happy valley, but ne’er from their station descended.”
Do you remember the visitor to Abbotsford, who, remembering the beautiful lines
inquired:
“Did you often visit it by moonlight, Sir Walter?”
“Alas, never!” confessed the poet.
Emerson says somewhere that we write by aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience, and the one writing may be as true as the other. Critical persons there may be, who seize upon passages in “Evangeline” as contrary to “facts.” Personally, I found few discrepancies between Longfellow and Baedeker.
Strikingly in evidence is the great increase in the number of tourists to the land of Evangeline. It is one of the wonders of literature, certainly without parallel on this side of the Atlantic, how Longfellow’s hexameters have fenced in this Acadian valley, and even peopled it with poetic ghosts. Thither in their thousands come the living twentieth-century flesh-and-blood to pay their tribute to the genius loci. I came across them lingering by Evangeline’s Well, and gazing sentimentally upon the spot where stood the forge of Basil. But they are, almost without exception, New England, not Old England pilgrims.
On the crest of the highroad stands the white-painted old chapel of the Scottish Covenanters, the high pulpit and the old-fashioned pews within, and no barer now than when the voice of the stern-faced preacher rang out his exhortations and his remonstrances against the world, the flesh, and the devil, to the meek self-denying flock in whose bosoms the influence of the world, the flesh, and the devil, was fleeting, remote, and exiguous indeed! These Scots were the successors by one remove, of the banished Acadians, and to them this land of Grand Pré must have been Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey; for owing to its sheltered situation and the marshes and many silt-conveying rivers, the soil is very fertile.
Along the road my driver urged his spirited mare. We turned presently sharp to the left, through a quaint stone gateway, with an appearance of such antiquity as if it might be coeval with the Round Tower of Newport, and through an avenue of apple-trees, which developed into a thickly planted orchard, so thick that the trees might almost have been an army, close-ranked for action (quære: a Pomeranian army?), and then winding in and out beneath the golden fruit, a house bursts on the view, a house of rambling pattern, many-winged and gabled, covered with flaming creeper; and in this house I passed several delightful days. Under that roof I listened to the pleasing gossip and animated reminiscence of an old judge who knew New Scotland well from Cape North to Cape Sable; who had for nigh fifty years travelled on circuit by good roads and bad, populous and lonely, by night and day, in summer and winter; who knew the people, especially the farmers, as Haliburton knew them; and who had many tales to tell of their customs and their manners, their hopes and their disappointments, their diversions, schemes, and oddities. There was in all this flow of talk no narrowness of vision—no pettiness; but much aspiration towards the broader, more generous point of view, much humour, much courtesy. And as I sat at dinner sipping, not cider, not tea, not “fire-water and bubbles,” but bumpers of champagne of noble vintage,[6] listening to the hale old judge,
Lowell’s words came to me, and I thought “The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for, and be buried in.” I thought of that often in New Scotland when I met some of her sons, and marked their characters and noted their talk—men of dignity, and ripeness, and gentleness, and kindliness, such men as my host, the old judge, of the present Chief Justice of the Province, of Sir Charles Tupper, still with us, of amiable Sir Malachy, of Judge S., and of many more. Of many, many more.
[6] I fancy this champagne was some of that carried by a French ship bound for St. Pierre, which was wrecked off a prohibition village on the south-east coast. The ship was making a return voyage loaded chiefly with French wines. As case after case was brought ashore the inhabitants looked blank. Every sturdy teetotaller suspected his neighbour, and nobody felt quite easy in his mind until an enterprising Yankee patent-medicine pedlar had carted away the whole stock, and Satan, speaking with a strong Rheims and Epernay accent, was placed at defiance.
“The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for, and be buried in.” O ye in England—at the heart of the Empire—deem not all the culture, all the innate courtesy and gentleness of manhood and womanhood is within the confines of your own little island, reckoning the folk overseas as all crude, and brusque, and unpolished, because of the examples that come out of the rough and strenuous West. There are thousands—Colonial-born, as were their fathers and grandfathers before them—who do not come back and sit at the Imperial Mother’s knee, who may not be seen careering up and down Regent Street, or imbibing strange beverages at the Hotel Cecil, who are the true sons of the Old Land, and better represent the qualities which have made her great than all the loud shouters from Toronto, the hustlers of Winnipeg, and the boosters of Vancouver. These others are of the type of men which make Canadian soil good to be born on—who carry on the tradition of the loyal, self-denying, idealistic spirit in which British Canada was founded; and I thank God they are not yet extinct.