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THE MARITIME PROVINCES. 6 



All, or nearly all, the best portion of the country, in an 

 agricultural point of view, lies in the interior and to the 

 westward. The old capital, Port Eoyal, afterwards named 

 by the English Annapolis Royal, has a most picturesque 

 position at the head of a beautiful bay, termed Anna- 

 polis Basin, on the western side of the province, and is 

 backed by the garden of Nova Scotia, the Annapolis 

 Valley, which extends in a direction parallel to the 

 coast, sheltered on both sides by steep hills crowned with 

 maple forests for more than sixty miles, when it termi- 

 nates on the shores of Minas Basin in the Grand Prd of 

 the French Acadians. 



The whole surfjice of the country is dotted with count- 

 less lakes. Often occurring in chains, these give rise to 

 the larger rivers which flow into the Atlantic. In fact, 

 all the rivers issue directly from lakes as their head 

 waters ; these latter, again, being supplied by forest 

 brooks rising in elevated swamps. In the hollows of the 

 high lands are likewise embosomed lakes of every variety 

 of form, and often quite isolated. Deep and intensely 

 blue, their shores fringed with rock boulders, and gene- 

 rally containing several islands, they do much to diversify 

 the monotony of the forest by their frequency and pic- 

 turesque scenery. In a paper read before the Nova- 

 Scotian Institute in 18G5, the writer, Mr. Belt, believes 

 that the conformation of the larger lake basins of Nova- 

 Scotia is due to glaciation, evidenced by the deep fur- 

 rows and scratchings on their exposed rocks, the rounding 

 of protuberant bosses, and the transportation of huge 

 boulders — the Grand Lake of the Shubenacadie chain 

 being a notable instance. 



Although the country is most uneven, sometimes 



