8 FROM BLOMIDON TO SMOKY. 



and sunlit realm. It was dreamlike to see the 

 tide creeping in over the shining red sand and 

 ooze, and changing their vivid tints by blending 

 with them its own colors to make tones strange 

 both to sea and sand. The wide expanses of 

 mud left bare by the tide told in their own way 

 the story of the Acadian dike builder. No man 

 of the soil could see the riches exposed daily to 

 view without wishing to keep them f orchis own 

 tillage. Even the man of to-day, who lay be- 

 side me on the turf of the Look-off, told of his 

 visions of a new dike many times greater than 

 any that the simple Acadian farmer had built, 

 and which is some day to snatch a million 

 dollars' worth of land from Minas Basin, and 

 make it into a part of the prosperous Nova 

 Scotia of the future. Listening to the dike 

 builder, and wondering at the absence in this 

 exquisite place of the hotels, pushing railways, 

 dainty steamers, and other machinery which at 

 home would long ago have been applied to give 

 this spot to the madding crowd, it suddenly 

 came over me that this was not a part of the 

 United States, but a sleepy corner of Greater 

 Britain. Even the great dike must be built on 

 paper in London before it intrudes on Minas 

 Basin. 



The next time that I fully realized Nova 

 Scotia's bondage was two days later, in Halifax 



