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 hare 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 lie* 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 



