ON CAPE BRETON. 



269 



" Bell of the past, whose now forgotten music 

 Once filled the wide expanse, 

 Tinging the sober twilight of the present 

 With colour of romance. 



I hear )-ou call and see the sun descending 



On rocks and waves and sand, 

 As down the coast the mission voices blending. 



Girdle the lieathen land. 



solemn bell ! whose consecrated masses 



Recall the faith of old — 

 Oh tinkling bell ! that lulled with twilight music 



Tlie spiritual fold. 



Your voice now breaks — now falters in the darkness. 



Breaks, falters, and is still. 

 And, valued and mystic, like the host descending, 



The sun sinks from the hill." ' 



Other places between Causeai; and Gabarus Bay have retained their old P'rench 

 names without change. Fourché or Forked Bay, Framboise or Raspberry Cove, L'Ardoise 

 or the Bay of Slate, and Petit Degrat, a famous " fishing place," in old times were all 

 named for certain natural characteristics to which Pichon in his Memoirs of Cape Breton 

 refers in detail. Flint Island, off Cow Bay (Morienue) is only the translation of He à 

 pierre à fusil, as it is called on Bellin's and other French maps in alhisiou to the hard- 

 ness of its rock. 



On the northeastern coast of the island, to the south of Cape North, is a crescent 

 shaped bay, with a fine beach of glittering sand barring the entrances of the barachois so 

 common in this vicinity. It bears on the maps the name of Aspy Bay, but in Bellin's and 

 other French maps of last century it was called either Havre Daspé or d'Achepé. Pichon 

 refers to it by its present name, and tells us that the country around it was not inhabited 

 and " hardly at all frequented." Its name is another of those questions which give an 

 opportunity for much speculation. Some may claim that it is a memorial of Basque 

 sailors who named the hilly country — perhaps the mountainous cape of Cape North itself, 

 which forms the northern boundary of the bay — from some fancied resemblance to the 

 Pic d'Aspé, among the Pyrenees, in a country well known to the people of the Basque 

 districts of Spain and France. Others may claim that the other name D'Achepé, given by 

 Bellin, is a Micmac term ; perhaps it is the Apégé, the name given by L'Escarbot for the 

 codfish.- The harsh Indian name might easily be softened in the course of time to Aspé 

 by the French, just as Graspé is believed to represent a contraction of the Abenaki word, 

 KatsepiSi, meaning a separation from the other land ' — a reference to the great rock which 

 was severed from the cape in the course of centuries, and was long conspicuous above the 

 waters, until at last it was worn away by the action of the ever restless ocean, and finally 

 hoisted from its place and hurled amid the waves.* 



X. The French Acadians, — their Condition and Prospects. 



But it is not only in the name of some headland or river or bay that we find memorials 

 of the old French rrgime on Cape Breton. Though Louisbourg is a grassy mound and St. 

 Anne, Toulouse and Inganiche are no longer known by their royal titles, still, on the 



' Slightly changed from Bret Harte's " Bells of the Angelus." 



-' See App. V to this work. 



^ See a note to Abbé Laverdière's edition of Champlain's works, vol- i, p. 08. The Abbé •!■ A. Manrault is 

 given as the auLhority for tlds version of tlie name given to Le Forillon, the rock in (juostion. L'Escarbot calls it 

 " Gachepn," (i. 270) following Cliamplain. For other meanings of the word see Ganong's article in 'Trans. Roy. 

 Soc. Can., vol. vii (1889), sec. 2, art. on Cartography to Champlain, p. 53. 



< See Faucher de Saint Maurice, " De Tribord à Bâbord " (Montreal, 1877), 399-402. 



