THE BAY OF FUNDY.


Ere long singular evidence of proximity to the wonderful tides of the
Bay of Fundy is seen, as all the streams show sloping banks,
stupendously muddy; mud reddish brown in color, smooth and oily looking,
gashed with seams, and with a lazily moving rivulet in the bed of the
stream from whence the retreating tide has sucked away the volume of
water.

"What a Paradise for bare-footed boys, and children with a predilection
for mud pies!" exclaims one of the tourists; while the other--the
practical, prosaic--remarks, "It looks like the chocolate frosting of
your cakes!" for which speech a shriveling look is received.

This great arm of the sea, reaching up so far into the land, and which
tried to convert Nova Scotia into an island (as man proposes to make
it, by channeling the isthmus), was known to early explorers as La Baie
Françoise, its present cognomen being a corruption of the French,
_Fond-de-la Baie_.

Being long, narrow, and running into the land like a tunnel, the tide
rises higher and higher as it ascends into the upper and narrowest
parts; thus in the eastern arm, the Basin of Minas, the tidal swell
rises forty feet, sometimes fifty or more in spring.

In Chignecto Bay, which extends in a more northerly direction from the
greater bay, the rise has been known to reach seventy feet in spring,
though it is usually between fifty and sixty at other times. Here, in