As we leave the station at Annapolis, we are obliged to put Madame de la Tour out of our minds to make room for another woman whose name, and we might say presence, fills all the valley before us.So it is that woman continues to reign, where she has once got a foothold, long after her dear frame has become dust.Evangeline, who is as real a personage as Queen Esther, must have been a different woman from Madame de la Tour.If the latter had lived at Grand Pre, she would, I trust, have made it hot for the brutal English who drove the Acadians out of their salt-marsh paradise, and have died in her heroic shoes rather than float off into poetry.But if it should come to the question of marrying the De la Tour or the Evangeline, Ithink no man who was not engaged in the peltry trade would hesitate which to choose.At any rate, the women who love have more influence in the world than the women who fight, and so it happens that the sentimental traveler who passes through Port Royal without a tear for Madame de la Tour, begins to be in a glow of tender longing and regret for Evangeline as soon as he enters the valley of the Annapolis River.For myself, I expected to see written over the railway crossings the legend,"Look out for Evangeline while the bell rings."When one rides into a region of romance he does not much notice his speed or his carriage; but I am obliged to say that we were not hurried up the valley, and that the cars were not too luxurious for the plain people, priests, clergymen, and belles of the region, who rode in them.Evidently the latest fashions had not arrived in the Provinces, and we had an opportunity of studying anew those that had long passed away in the States, and of remarking how inappropriate a fashion is when it has ceased to be the fashion.
The river becomes small shortly after we leave Annapolis and before we reach Paradise.At this station of happy appellation we looked for the satirist who named it, but he has probably sold out and removed.If the effect of wit is produced by the sudden recognition of a remote resemblance, there was nothing witty in the naming of this station.Indeed, we looked in vain for the "garden" appearance of the valley.There was nothing generous in the small meadows or the thin orchards; and if large trees ever grew on the bordering hills, they have given place to rather stunted evergreens; the scraggy firs and balsams, in fact, possess Nova Scotia generally as we saw it,--and there is nothing more uninteresting and wearisome than large tracts of these woods.We are bound to believe that Nova Scotia has somewhere, or had, great pines and hemlocks that murmur, but we were not blessed with the sight of them.Slightly picturesque this valley is with its winding river and high hills guarding it, and perhaps a person would enjoy a foot-tramp down it; but, I think he would find little peculiar or interesting after he left the neighborhood of the Basin of Minas.
Before we reached Wolfville we came in sight of this basin and some of the estuaries and streams that run into it; that is, when the tide goes out; but they are only muddy ditches half the time.The Acadia College was pointed out to us at Wolfville by a person who said that it is a feeble institution, a remark we were sorry to hear of a place described as "one of the foremost seats of learning in the Province."But our regret was at once extinguished by the announcement that the next station was Grand Pre! We were within three miles of the most poetic place in North America.
There was on the train a young man from Boston, who said that he was born in Grand Pre.It seemed impossible that we should actually be near a person so felicitously born.He had a justifiable pride in the fact, as well as in the bride by his side, whom he was taking to see for the first time his old home.His local information, imparted to her, overflowed upon us; and when he found that we had read "Evangeline, his delight in ****** us acquainted with the scene of that poem was pleasant to see.The village of Grand Pre is a mile from the station; and perhaps the reader would like to know exactly what the traveler, hastening on to Baddeck, can see of the famous locality.
We looked over a well-grassed meadow, seamed here and there by beds of streams left bare by the receding tide, to a gentle swell in the ground upon which is a not heavy forest growth.The trees partly conceal the street of Grand Pre, which is only a road bordered by common houses.Beyond is the Basin of Minas, with its sedgy shore, its dreary flats; and beyond that projects a bold headland, standing perpendicular against the sky.This is the Cape Blomidon, and it gives a certain dignity to the picture.
The old Normandy picturesqueness has departed from the village of Grand Pre.Yankee settlers, we were told, possess it now, and there are no descendants of the French Acadians in this valley.I believe that Mr.Cozzens found some of them in humble circumstances in a village on the other coast, not far from Halifax, and it is there, probably, that the"Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of homespun, And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline's story, While from its rocky caverns the deep-voiced, neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest."At any rate, there is nothing here now except a faint tradition of the French Acadians; and the sentimental traveler who laments that they were driven out, and not left behind their dikes to rear their flocks, and cultivate the rural virtues, and live in the simplicity of ignorance, will temper his sadness by the reflection that it is to the expulsion he owes "Evangeline " and the luxury of his romantic grief.So that if the traveler is honest, and examines his own soul faithfully, he will not know what state of mind to cherish as he passes through this region of sorrow.