ON CAPE BEETON. 279 



Noury, Cloué and others less distinguished, who have visited Spanish Bay in later times 

 and admired its commercial capabilities and its picturesque features. The history of Syd- 

 ney, after it became the capital, was for years the history of Cape Breton. Here DesBarres 

 fought his battles with the officials and the commander of the garrison, that occupied for 

 many years the barracks, of which a few ruined buildings still remain on the northern 

 end of the peninsula on which the town is built. Here and there one-storied, low-eaved 

 houses, often buried in the heavy snowfalls of winter, tell of the humble little town where 

 men fretted and fumed with all the importance of officials, or toiled to make a living in 

 that distant outpost of England's empire. The town has had a sluggish growth during 

 its century of existence, and it is only within a few years, with the development of the 

 coal mines in the vicinity, that it has thrown off the apathy of the past and taken a place 

 among the active mercantile communities of Nova Scotia. Now that this old place, situ- 

 ated on a peninsula admirably adapted for a large town, has direct railway connection with 

 the rest of the continent, it sees before itself a future which it could never have had whilst 

 it was practically isolated from the rest of the continent except by sea. At last Sydney, 

 from the Atlantic shore, can, in a metaphorical sense, clasp hands with its prosperous 

 sister town, amid its environment of mountains on the fair Pacific coast. It has an ener- 

 getic competitor in North Sydney, some six miles lower down the harbour, not far from 

 the entrance of the port, where the old mining association of Cape Breton has long done 

 a large business, and near which the first English historian of the island lived for many 

 years in a pleasant home, now showing the signs of age, but still charming for its flowers 

 and shrubberies and its vista of the great sea beyond the cliffs. In the summer days the 

 harbour of Sydney is visited by vessels of the French fleet ' that protect the fisheries on 

 the coast of Newfoundland, and the descendants of the Basque, Breton and Norman 

 adventurers of old still drag up the riches of the sea on the Grand Banks where 

 the codfish appear as prolific, as in the days when those sailors first explored the unknown 

 waters of eastern America. By the irony of fate, the only remains of French dominion 

 now in the gulf of St. Lawrence are the insignificant islands of St. Pierre, Miquelon and 

 Langley, off the southern coast of the great island, to which the names of Baccalaos, Terre 

 Neuve, Avalon and Newfoundland have clung from the days of Cabot and Cortereal to 

 the present. Louisbourg is in ruins, and the French flag is no longer seen in that lonely 

 port, but floats only from the mastheads of ships of France in the very harbour which they 

 neglected in the days when her king was master on his royal island. 



After leaving the old town of Sydney we have to travel for a distance of at least 

 twenty-four miles over a fairly good road which offers no particular attractions except for 

 a few minutes when we cross the Mira river, a noble stream which broadens, some 

 miles from its mouth, into a long expansive lake surrounded by well-wooded hills, and is 

 justly named Grraud Mira by the people. Grlimpses of Catalogne Lake and of the great 

 ocean away beyond to the eastward help to relieve the monotony of a rugged landscape. 



' Until a few years af;o the French flag floated from a tall staff on a grass plct near the water's edge in front of 

 a large white house, with wide generous verandah and green shrubberies, which was and is still one of the con- 

 spicuous features of the harbour side of the town. Within a stone's throw of this old mansion — whose framework 

 is now nearly a century old — have anchored the vessels of the Newfoundland squadron for forty years and more, 

 and in its quaint, low rooms, fitted with mementos of French sailor."!, of many eminent men known in the naval 

 history and in the official records of France, like Cloué and La Roncière Le Noury, have partaken of the hospi- 

 talities of the kindly owner, the late Senator Bourinot, long a vice-consul of France. 



