The Sun.
London, England, 1865-10-24 00:00:00

The British American Provinces.

(From the Special Correspondent of the Times.)
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, Oct. 10.
Were there anything like a tolerable steamboat
on the route, the voyage from St. John, New Bruns-
wick, across the Bay of Fundy, to Windsor, in
Nova Scotia, would, in fine weather, be one of the
most agreeable that a pleasure tourist could select
in this hemisphere. But in America, whether in the
United States or in the British colonies, no one
travels unless compelled by necessity. The fact is
well known to the purveyors of locomotion, and they
act accordingly. Railway cars and railway appli-
ances of the most inferior and uncomfortable cha-
racter are theiAtytatiuonnrodmoitisngneounorlhvetla,ce throughout the continent, and
as all who travel must travel, all who travel must
content themselves with such accommodation as
railway directors may see fit to supply. The steam-
boat
companies in New York and New England
have a little more conscience, and on the Hudson
River their mode of dealing with travellers forms a
splendid exception to the generally prevailing ens-
tom of treating them as if they were cattle or bales
of cotton. The Hudson River boats are so conve-
nient as well as gorgeous that they have received
and merit the name of floating palaces. Were it
not for the overcrowding, which is the fault of the
public rather than of the owners, they might be
fairly considered as providing the highest amount
of ease and luxury of which locomotion is capable.
But their exceptional magnificence only darkens the
contrast exhibited by the tawdry and perilous tubs
that do duty for steamboats in the inland waters of
North America. If there be degrees in this kind of
badness, the boats that ply on the rivers, harbours,
and coasts of the British colonies merit the distinc-
tion of being the worst, and suggest but too palpably
the idea that their proprietors buy up the old and
worn-out steamers of the Yankees , as the Jews in
London buy up old clothes, to revamp them for an
inferior or a more easily deluded class of customers.
It is hard to resist the belief, when on board of such
a vessel in a cross sea, that the creaking craft has
for. 15 years or thereabout escaped the manifold
perils of snagging,
and boiler bursting collision in the fog, conflagration,
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posed of in her old age to a colonial purchaser as
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thcerEesmt
pOfertohreshpeeadviheustt
slowly for 70 miles across the bay through the
Minas
headland known as Split
Minas.
A little after daybreak we ar-
riCvheadnnae of
at the
remarkableßock, and often, with equal appropriateness, called
4t Cape Tumble Down," a promontory which seems
as if it had been shattered by lightning or other
more terrible agency of Nature, and left in such a
state of chaotic ruin as to be liable at every howl of
the tempest or every dash of the billows to be
washed into the sea. From this point the course
e s th
lies through the Basin of Minas, bounded on each
side by those portions of Acadia which Mr. Long-
fellow has celebrated in his poem of "Evangeline"
—a fact which several of my fellow-travellers took
especial pains to impress upon my mind ; such of
them as were either Nova Scotians or New Bruns-
wickers supplementing the information by their re-
grets that Mr. Longfellow had not condescended to
visit the province which he undertook to describe.
It did not appear, however, that his descriptions of
the scenery and productions of the Acadian wilder-
ness did any serious outrage to the truth of Nature,
or that his pictures of Acadian life and character
people portrayed yeekd his
in in
the
would have been very different if he had lived
flowing
among the
hexameters.scen
and
morning, and Submitting to an examination of our
luggage at the Custom-house—though we had come
from no foreign State, but only from the sister colony
of New Brunswick, that persists, like Canada and
e
Arriving at Windsor
at e
about 11 tr
Nova Scotia, in having her own tariff of customs
duties—we had to wait until half-past 12 for the
train that was to convey us to Halifax. There is
nothing to be seen at Windsor but a great hotel on
the American model, about ten times as large as the
trade of the place demands or is
ever likely to require,
and remarkable among establishments of its kind
for its sublime indifference to the wants of travellers.
who had nothing to do for an hour an a half but
d
hotel, large enough
There were upwards of 100 hungry andthirst people
to eat and drink, yet this huge
to accommodate 500 or 600 guests, had nothing to
to offer them—not even a welcome or a place to sit
down in, or a civil functionary to answer the simplest