cessors have
long since passed away. It certainly was with an eye to business and
not to pleasure, that Hazen, Simonds and White built the first roadway
to Rockwood Park. Could our pioneers in trade revisit the scene of
their labors and note the changes time has wrought what would be their
amazement? They would hardly recognize their surroundings. Instead of
rocks and crags covered with spruce and cedar, with here and there an
open glade, and the wide spreading mud flats at low tide they would
behold the wharves that line our shores, the ocean steamships lying in
the channel, grain elevators that receive the harvests of Canadian
wheat-fields two thousand miles away, streets traversed by electric
cars and pavements traversed by thousands of hurrying feet, bicyclists
darting hither and thither, squares tastefully laid out and adorned
with flowers, public buildings and residences of goodly proportions
and by no means devoid of beauty, palatial hotels opening their doors
to guests from every clime, institutions for the fatherless and the
widow, the aged, the poor, the unfortunate, the sick the insane,
churches with heaven directing spires, schools whose teachers are
numbered by the hundred and pupils by the thousand, public libraries,
courts of justice and public offices of nearly every description,
business establishments whose agents find their way into every nook
and corner of old-time Acadie, railways and steamboats that connect
the city with all parts of the globe, splendid bridges that span the
rocky gorge at the mouth of the St. John where twice in the course of
every twenty-four hours the battle, old as the centuries, rages
between the outpouring torrent of the mighty river and the inflowing
tide of the bay.

A few years since the writer of this history in an article in the New
Brunswick Magazine endeavored to contrast a Saturday night of the
olden time with one of modern days.[69]

[69] New Brunswick Magazine of October, 1898, p. 190.

[Illustration: A COTTAGE OF TODAY.]

"Saturday night in the year 1764--The summer sun sinks behind the
hills and the glow of evening lights the harbor. At the landing place
at Portland Point, one or two fishing boats are lying on the beach,
and out a little from the shore a small square sterned schooner lies
at her anchor. The natural lines of the harbor are clearly seen. In
many places the forest has crept down nearly to the water's edge.
Wharves and shipping there are none.