BANKS OF THE KESWICK EIVER. 87 



look upon the land itself, that I scarcely regretted my 

 inability to stop and converse with the settlers, from 

 whose months I could only anticipate a lamentation over 

 the evils which the long absence of rain had brought 

 upon them. The reader, however, must not imagine 

 that such droughts are common in New Brunswick. 

 Farmers who had been forty years in the country assured 

 me, as I have already stated, that they had never known 

 anything like the rainless spring and summer of 1849. 



Leaving the Scotch Settlement, we crossed the Mac- 

 taquac River, and then a ridge of land partially settled 

 which separates the valley of the Mactaquac from that 

 of the Keswick River. Along the right bank of this 

 river, the upland is of good quality in many places. It 

 lies upon the youngest of the slate rocks which occur in 

 this part of the province. In descending to the river, we 

 passed through the first purely beech forest I had yet seen 

 on my tour. It was very beautiful, entirely free from 

 underwood, and in many places so open that it would be 

 easy to ride through it on horseback. The soil of a 

 beech forest is usually good, but it is shallow, resting on 

 a hard subsoil, and therefore is not regarded as of first- 

 rate quality. 



In the bottom of the valley, and at the mouth of the 

 Keswick River, there is much good low intervale and 

 island land — a sandy loam, light in colour and easy to 

 work, in favourable seasons yielding good crops, and 

 valued at present at about £10 currency an acre. The 

 Keswick passes through a beautiful and somewhat bold 

 country. For the last eight or ten miles of its course, its 

 left bank is skirted by an escarpment of grey sandstone, 

 which here forms the north-western boundary of the coal- 

 field of New Brunswick, and gives a character both to 

 the soils and to the scenery. Along the course of this 

 river grants of land were made, in 1783, to the disbanded 

 soldiers of the New York Volunteers and Royal Guides, 



