24 AYLESFORD SAND-PLAIN. 



becomes sandy ; and there is here, occupying a large 

 breadth of the valley, an extent of many miles of light 

 and comparatively worthless land. On this poor soil I 

 saw, for the first time, the sweet fern, Comptonia aspleni 

 folia^ which I became well acquainted with in my after 

 journeys in New Brunswick. It rejoices in light, sandy, 

 almost useless soils, of which I know scarcely any more 

 sure practical indicator. 



The " Old Judge " thus describes what he calls the 

 great Aylesford sand-plain : — 



" The great Aylesford sand-plain folks call it, in a 

 ginral way, the DeviFs Goose Pasture. It is thirteen 

 miles long and seven miles wide ; it ain't jest drifting 

 sand, but it's all but that, it's so barren. It's oneaven, 

 or wavy, like the swell of the sea in a calm, and is covered 

 witli short, thin, dry, coarse grass, and dotted here and 

 there with a half-starved birch and a stunted mis-shapen 

 spruce. Two or three hollow places hold water all 

 through the summer, and the whole plain is criss-crossed 

 with cart or horse tracks in all directions. It is jest 

 about as silent, and lonesome, and desolate a place as you 

 would wish to see. Each side of this desert are some 

 most royal farms — some of the best, perhaps, in the pro- 

 vince — containing the rich lowlands under the mountain ; 

 but the plain is given up to the geese, who are so wretched 

 poor that the foxes won't eat them, they hurt their teeth 

 so bad. All that country thereabouts, as I have heard 

 tell when I was a boy, was oncest owned by the lord, 

 the king, and the devil. The glebe-lands belonged to 

 to the first, the ungranted wilderness-lands to the second, 

 and the sand-plain fell to the share of the last, (and people 

 do say the old gentleman was rather done in the divi- 

 sion, but that is neither here nor there,) and so it is called 

 to this day the Devil's Goose Pasture."* 



* TJie Old Judge, vol. ii. p. 5. 



