coast, she shows us smooth basins whose shores are soft and wooded to the
water's edge, and into which empty wonderful tidal rivers, whose courses,
where the tide-water has flowed out, lie like curving bands of bright
brown satin among the green fields. She has no barrenness, no
unsightliness, no poverty; everywhere beauty, everywhere riches. She is
biding her time.

But most beautiful among her beauties, most wonderful among her wonders,
are her children. During two weeks' travel in the provinces, I have been
constantly more and more impressed by their superiority in appearance,
size, and health to the children of the New England and Middle States. In
the outset of our journey I was struck by it; along all the roadsides they
looked up, boys and girls, fair, broad-cheeked, sturdy-legged, such as
with us are seen only now and then. I did not, however, realize at first
that this was the universal law of the land, and that it pointed to
something more than climate as a cause. But the first school that I saw,
_en masse_, gave a startling impetus to the train of observation and
inference into which I was unconsciously falling. It was a Sunday school
in the little town of Wolfville, which lies between the Gaspcreau and
Cornwallis rivers, just beyond the meadows of the Grand Pré, where lived
Gabriel Lajeunesse, and Benedict Bellefontaine, and the rest of the
"simple Acadian farmers."

"Mists from the mighty Atlantic" more than "looked on the happy valley"
that Sunday morning. Convicting Longfellow of a mistake, they did descend
"from their stations," on solemn Blomidon, and fell in a slow, unpleasant
drizzle in the streets of Wolfville and Horton. I arrived too early at one
of the village churches, and while I was waiting for a sexton a door
opened, and out poured the Sunday school, whose services had just ended.
On they came, dividing in the centre, and falling to the right and left