Nova Scotia; The Province That Has Been Passed by (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III NEW SCOTLAND'S CHARACTERISTICS One finds it difficult, briefly by means of analogy, to describe this peninsula of New Scotland. Yet it may not unfairly be compared to Old Scotland. Many of the features of the land are the same, nor is the climate unlike. But when we come to the human element we have no difficulty at all. Mixed as the population is, the Scots predominate. The late Lieutenant-Governor was a Fraser. The present holder of the office is a Macgregor, the Premier is a Murray, the Acting-Premier and Attorney-General is a Maclean, the Mayor of Halifax is a Chisholm. The Erasers, Macdonalds, M'Gillivrays, Wallaces, and M'Inneses furnish forth the bench, the bar, journalism, and the learned professions; and it is perhaps needless to tell you that the Scot here, as elsewhere in Canada, more than holds his own ?" and maybe that of ither folk "?in the commercial world. But this is not saying enough about New Scotland considered as a transatlantic habitation and hunting-ground of the Old Scot. Here are still Gaelic communities where the Sassenach tongue is not heard. On the eve of the American Revolution a tide of emigration had set in from the old Scotland to the new, the first to arrive being a shipload of Highlanders in 1773. For many years, despite the terrible conditions of an ocean passage in those days,THE NOVA SCOTIANS 23 the tide flowed on. Emigrants, in the old days, were forced to spend weeks or even months on the voyage, pent like cattle in ships frequently infected by small-por and scurvy. Some 25,000 Scottish peasants settled on Cape Breton Island alone, while numbers landed on the shores of Northumberland Strait, in the counties now known as Pictou and Antigonish. Their hardships were not over when they landed; but with indomitable pluck they...