On we went to Beauséjour, on the other side of the Missaguash. Here ruins very similar to those at Louisbourg meet the eye, solid casements and bastions which have resisted the tooth of time, and where now cattle browse peacefully. One of the longest structures, the Governor’s house, solidly built of stone, is now a veritable cattle-shed, in which I counted ten cows herded closely together. But the view across the marshes and Cumberland Basin, across to the Elysian fields and the distant Cobequid mountains, was entrancing. The foreground was bathed in golden sunshine, the background seemed pale purple, as of a mist, while overhead mighty picturesque masses of creamy cumulus cloud rolled like a full sail of some divine argosy. A great dismantled wooden mansion, built in pretentious Georgian style, caught my eye a stone-throw from the fort, dating probably from the Fort Cumberland period, and I bent my steps towards it.

I have never before viewed such complete desolation and decay, the result merely of age and neglect, and not of fire or earthquake. One step within the portals convinced me that to venture further would be to endanger life and to invite the instant collapse of the whole edifice, whose every beam and rafter trembled on the brink of utter destruction. And yet because the house, though expensively built, was built of wood, there was nothing venerable about it or dignified—it rather inspired contempt, as of a dissipated old rogue, whose vices had wrecked his constitution, and was ready to tumble into the gutter. Eager as I am for the preservation of ancient monuments, it was with something like relief that I reflected that this rollicking old ruin was on the other side of the New Scotland frontier.

Twenty miles from Amherst is Joggins, the centre of the Cumberland county coal-fields, which begin at Maccan. I have not the slightest idea who Joggins was, but I feel certain that were he alive to-day he would have every reason to feel proud of the growth and prosperity of his name-place. The output of coal here is very large. The Joggins shore extends along Chignecto Bay, with imposing cliffs, occasionally three or four hundred feet high. Here are exposed some wonderful petrified forests and sections of carboniferous strata, which have been visited and described by scientists of such eminence as Sir Charles Lyell, Sir William Dawson, and Sir William Logan.

The coal area extends inland without a break forty or fifty miles to the neighbourhood of Oxford, the most important colliery being at Springhill, where the annual output is over half a million tons.

From an old resident I got an interesting purview of this part of New Scotland in the early ‘60’s. Half a century ago the whole district, from the mouth of the river Philip to the upper waters of that river, was known as “River Philip.” Neighbouring settlements bore distinctive names, such as “Mount Pleasant,” now Centreville, “Moores,” now Rockley, “Goose River,” now Linden, and “Little River,” which still retains its name.

Four post-offices, kept generally in trunks, served the commercial and social wants of the whole length of the river. They were listed as “Mouth of the River,” somewhere on the post road between Pugwash and Amherst. “Head of Tide,” now Oxford. “River Philip Corner,” where the old road from Amherst to Londonderry crosses the river, and “Upper River Philip,” where at that time one Rufus Black, one of Samuel Slick’s hosts, carried on an extensive lumbering and mercantile business. There were no railways nearer than Truro on the one side and Moncton on the other. The only prophetic suggestion of the present Intercolonial Railway was a stretch of embankment somewhere on the Nappan marshes, which had been thrown up in some spasmodic, perhaps electioneering, effort, in the days when Joseph Howe was strenuously contending for an “Inter-Provincial,” “All British” line from Halifax to Quebec.