“Big Harbour? Then why don’t ye say Big Harbour and have done with it?” was the indignant surrejoinder; which seems reasonable. Then three miles later we came to an upstanding and outstanding headland.

“What’s that?” we asked.

“That?” said the captain glibly, “Oh, that’s Watchabuketckt.”

“I don’t believe it!” retorted the Yankee.

Some visitors entertain the firm opinion that the late Mr. Dudley Warner, an American humorist, who used to stay in this locality, invented a good deal of the nomenclature. But it is not so; it is all in Haliburton.

Apropos of inventors, there is a spacious, well-built mansion on our right, which was long ago built by, and is still the residence of, that Scottish-Canadian genius to whom the world is indebted for that perennially-amazing instrument the telephone. Strange how many thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people in London, who daily see the emblem of a bell on the telephone call-offices connect that emblem with Alexander Graham Bell, the white-haired old gentleman who combines work and play at his summer home here at Ben Bhreagh. Glimpses of outbuildings can be had as the steamer moves along—laboratory and workshops; and on the lake in front of Ben Bhreagh rose the first working aeroplane in Canada, in which Dr. Bell has taken a keen interest. It must have been from some aerial craft that the name of Spectacle Island was given to the insula minor which flanks the harbour of Baddeck. Myself, gazing at it from terra firma or the deck of a small steamer, should never have detected any resemblance to a pair of spectacles.

But here we are at Baddeck, a village of 1500 souls, built on land sloping upwards from the land-locked harbour. There is here yet no large summer caravanserai—such as I had expected to find—adorned with spacious verandas, pretty girls, and a Blue Caledonian orchestra; but there is plenty of accommodation in smaller hotels and boarding houses, and I am bound to say one meets some very nice people in Baddeck. Amongst them was a Harvard professor and his two daughters, and a Brooklyn yachtsman with his two yachts, and it would be hard to say which was the fairer, yacht or damsel; although as regards the young lady who discussed with me Dr. Wallis Budge’s quartos on The Gods of Egypt, none might allege that she was in any sense fast.

O young lady by the shores of Baddeck, take thy Budge with thee into the wilderness and hook the romping trout, or paddle the gay canoes with Budge under thy shapely arm and the gods of Egypt in thy brain, for in such wise only may any fair Bostonian unbend and frolic with Chloe while offering at the shrine of Minerva! If it is true that I chaffed thee, why

From Baddeck many in the season set out for the salmon pools of the Margary River, thirty miles distant, over a good road, and to numerous trout lakes much nearer at hand. Sea trout fishing, of course, may be had at Baddeck. All this is Victoria County, a great slab of territory which runs straight northward to Cape North and St. Lawrence Bay.

One returns to Iona and Grand Narrows, and entrains for Sydney and the east. I shall not quickly forget the railway station at Grand Narrows on account of a curious custom which prevails at this place. The refreshment room is managed by a gentleman with a large family. All trains stop here twenty minutes for dinner and supper. A sonorous bell is rung. The doors are opened, and a flock of hungry travellers troop in at fifty cents a head to discover, not without chagrin, the restaurateur’s family at dinner occupying the best places and already hard at work.

“It gives ’em an unfair start,” complained a commercial traveller to me as he filled his pipe. “By the time I’d located the dining-room, although I sprinted down the platform as hard as I could go, I was sixty seconds too late, and—there was only dough-nuts left!”

Which reminds one of the swift gastronomic feats which greeted the eyes of Chuzzlewit on his arrival in New York seventy years ago.

I must not forget to mention that there is held here annually under the broad and open sky, Nature’s own great cathedral, a famous Gaelic Communion service.

Amongst this Gaelic population are counted many bards, inspired men who compose epic ballads as they did centuries ago and do still in the land of Ossian. And the songs of the Highlands, the “Fhir a Ohata,” the “Tamhuil mòr, mac sheann Tamhuil,” still float out upon the air; while the traditions of old Highland feuds or the Jacobite risings of ‘15 or ‘45 still linger, eked out by such visible memorials as one may see, beside the rude chimneypiece—an ancient dirk or a rusty claymore that some long-vanished ancestor had flourished at Culloden or Falkirk.

But few of the aboriginal red men, the Micmacs, crossed my path in Cape Breton, and those that did were very much civilised. One stalwart specimen who travelled with me to Mira River wore a starched high collar, and was ready to discuss such questions as Home Rule for Ireland with me. To find the Micmacs in any number one must seek out their settlements, chiefly about the Bras d’Or, or attend one of their annual reunions. Years ago the Micmacs professed subjection to the Mohawks, and used to send a deputation in a canoe up the St. Lawrence to pay homage to the chiefs of that tribe in Canada. A century or two ago they were savage warriors in the pay of the French, and gave the English a great deal of trouble in the eastern and south-eastern parts of Cape Breton, and were especially active in scalping any survivors of wrecked vessels which came their way. Nor did they go unrewarded by titles and dignities. There is still, I believe, in existence a parchment commission, signed by Louis XV., conferring on a certain savage the kingship of the tribe, which is preserved by his collateral descendants; and there is more than one medal of honour yet worn emanating from the same exalted source. To-day, however, the Cape Breton Micmacs are no longer distinguished for ferocity; such pleasing mementoes as English scalps have been solemnly burned before the camp-fire; they have proved amenable to religion, they have taken kindly to farming on reserved lands, and the few hundreds who survive seem on the whole very honest, sober, and good-natured.

It happened at Christmas Island station. There was an island opposite, long and low, with firs at either end, and there were newly-made green-clad furrows upon it. Between it and the mainland was a lagoon formed by a low reef, upon which a number of thrifty cattle grazed peacefully. In the water adjoining was the skeleton of a vessel—perhaps some ship which had been driven ashore in a winter storm. In the distance the clouds hung so low as to shut out the base of a range of dark green hills.

“Why is it called Christmas Island?” I enquired of the girl, who seemed about eighteen, with a comely face and a profusion of dark chestnut hair. She was dressed in some light muslin or poplin stuff, and upon her feet she wore a pair of something which puzzled me at first, until I recognised in them the saffron-coloured football boots of Northampton. They were several sizes too large for her; and I have no doubt the damsel marvelled much at their shape and colour, but was reconciled by the thought that they were the latest fashion in the Old World “across yonder.”

To my question she replied:

“Oh, I think it’s because they discovered it on Christmas Day. The Indians go there to hold their feast every year.”

We strolled together to a small cottage marked “Post Office.”

“I am waiting for the mail to be sorted,” volunteered my companion.

“You expect a letter?” I asked.

She blushed and nodded.

“Is he far away?”

She answered: “Mother and me are always ‘expecting letters.’ You see, I have two brothers in the steel works at Sydney, another out in Manitoba, and father’s mostly away fishing.”

“And he?” I persisted.

“Oh, he?” She laughed. “Well, I don’t get any letters from him. He’s a brakeman on the Intercolonial, and I can see him every day if I like. I’ve written a piece for a prize poetry competition in a Boston paper, and I’m wonderin’ if I’ll get my five dollars or if it’s only a snide.”

One other scene of a different kind I should like to give, because it will always live in my memory. It was of an aged, yet stalwart Highlander, who in early youth had migrated to the new Inverness across the ocean. I watched him as he sat by the roadside with his little granddaughter on his knee; and she told me afterwards he was singing to her (as he often did) a little Gaelic song he had sung sixty odd years ago over the grave of his mother and his first sweetheart, which he had dug with his own hands. It was a year of famine in Cape Breton, but he had not lost courage. At first he had hardly missed the heather, “but now grandfather’s hopin’ to see the heather again—across yonder.”