[61] 



III. 



Eeminiscences op Eminent Nova Scotians for Forty Years. 



I. Racial Elements of the Nova Scotian People. — The short historical 

 review which I have given in the tirst part of this monograph shows that 

 the people of Nova Scotia can claim a most honourable ancestry — that 

 many important racial elements have entered into their composition in 

 the course of two centuries and longer. French Catholics and Hugue- 

 nots, Puritans and Cavaliers of the days of the Stuarts, German 

 Lutherans from the old kingdom of Hanover, Protestants from Mont- 

 beliard between the Ehine and the Ehone, Scots from the Highlands, the 

 Hebrides and the Lowlands, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians from the north 

 and Catholic Celts from the south of Ireland, Englishmen from the hop 

 gardens of Kent and the meadows of Devon, from all parts of the 

 ancient kingdoms where Celt, Saxon and Norman have blended in the 

 course of centuries— all these have contributed to form the people who 

 have made the Acadian peninsula and the island of Cape Breton such 

 prosperous and influential sections of the Dominion. I have shown that 

 each class has contributed its quota of men who have made the name of 

 Nova Scotia so well known in many lands. The dark stone floors of the 

 gloomy corridors of the old legislative building in Halifax have echoed 

 to the tread of many men, statesmen, jurists, journaHsts, historians and 

 poets, associated with the most interesting epochs of provincial history. 

 Those legislative halls seem to one like myself full of the voices of men 

 who proved the energy, the eloquence, the vitality of their national 

 origin. To me those corridors and halls are familiar ground — associated 

 with memories of my early manhood. When I visit the old town of 

 Sydney, where I was born, or walk the streets of the old city of Halifax 

 where I was a journalist from 1859 till 1867, 1 begin to recognize the fact 

 that I am growing old and becoming a man of reminiscences. As I look 

 at the faces I meet, or enter the legislative chambers of the province 

 building, it is chiefly memories now that come to greet me. 



"Let me review the scene, 



And summon from the shadowy past 



The forms that once have been." 



