GASPEREAU VALLEY, NOVA SCOTIA—HAYCOCK. 363 
The soil is more variable. Boulder-clay lies in thin sheets or 
in thick masses in some places on the North Mountain ; it is 
more abundant in the Cornwallis Valley ; but it reaches its 
greatest development along the bordering slopes and in the minor 
depressions of the elevated southern band. This deposit almost 
always forms deep and heavy but workable soils. Along the 
lower slopes it is made up in large part of debris dragged and 
pushed from the adjacent valley, and to that extent it possesses 
the fertility of the valley soils; but farther south the slates 
make up a larger and larger portion and the soils are correspond- 
ingly poorer. Where the boulder-clay is wanting, the underlying 
slates are bare or thinly covered by a worthless soil; while 
farther south towards the granite country the surface is thickly 
strewn with granite boulders and wholly given over to forest 
growth. 
The town of Wolfville lies at the foot of the northern slope 
of this elevated band of country, but the slate ridge to the south 
of the town, though essentially a part of the plain above des- 
cribed, is cut off from it by a river valley and narrow strip of 
fertile land which duplicates in every essential character the 
broader Cornwallis Valley to the north. The Gaspereau Valley is 
as essentially an outlying fragment of the Cornwallis Valley as 
the Wolfville ridge is an outlier and separated fragment of the 
broad southern tableland. 
This ridge, some three hundred feet in height behind the town 
of Wolfville, gradually rises towards the southwest and within 
a few miles becomes level with and a part of the plain to the 
southeast. To the northeast it descends with long and convex 
sweeps, sinking beneath the marsh at Lower Horton. From its 
southern brow of slate the observer looks down upon a silvery 
stream winding through double lines of drooping willows, or 
through level intervales rising into broad low terraces, which 
sweep with many a curve up into the bounding hills, the whole 
presenting a scene of quiet and tranquil beauty that the broader 
valley cannot equal. 
Opposite Wolfville the valley bottom is rather more than a 
mile in width. Eastwardly, as the enclosing northern ridge 
