with inexpressible beauty. Stop, John Ormond, or drive slowly;
let us enjoy _dolce far niente_. To hang now in our curricle upon this
wooded hill-top, overlooking the clear surface of the lake, with leafy
island, and peninsula dotted in its depths, in all its native grace,
without a touch or trace of hand-work, far or near, save and except a
single spot of sail in the far-off, is holy and sublime.

And there we rested, reverentially impressed with the week-day sabbath. We
lingered long and lovingly upon our woody promontory, our eyrie among the
spruces of Cape Breton.

"Clear, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring."

Down hill go horses and mail-coach, and we are lost in a vast avenue of
twinkling birches. For miles we ride within breast-high hedges of sunny
shrubs, until we reach another promontory, where Bras d'Or again breaks
forth, with bay, island, white beach, peninsula, and sparkling cove. And
before us, bowered in trees, lies Chapel Island, the Micmac Mecca, with
its Catholic Church and consecrated ground. Here at certain seasons the
red men come to worship the white CHRIST. Here the western descendants of
Ishmael pitch their bark tents, and swing their barbaric censers before
the Asiatic-born REDEEMER. "They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow
before HIM." That gathering must be a touching sermon to the heart of
faith!

But we roll onwards, and now are again on the clearings, among the
log-cabins of the Highlandmen. Although every settler has his governmental
farm, yet nearly the whole of it is still in forest-land. A log hut and
cleared-acre lot, with Flora McIvor's grubbing, hoeing, or chopping, while
their idle lords and masters trot beside the mail-coach to hear the news,
are the only results of the home patronage. At last we come to a gentle
declivity, a bridge lies below us, a wider brook; we cross over to find a
cosy inn and a rosy landlord on the other side; and John Ormond lays down
the ribbons, after a sixty-mile drive, to say: "This is St. Peter's."

Now so far us the old-fashioned inns of New Scotland are concerned, I
must say they make me ashamed of our own. Soap, sand, and water, do not
cost so much as carpets, curtains, and fly-blown mirrors; but still, to
the jaded traveller, they have a more attractive aspect. We sit before a
snow-white table