Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/167

Rh and is a port of call for the steamer which plies between Wolfville and Parrsboro.

From Canning begins the abrupt ascent to North Mountain. The vista broadens from the wharves and rivulets of leafy villages to the wide blue haze of Minas waters, to the scar of Blomidon and the hills of the Cumberland shore. North Mountain is the elongated barrier which stretches a hundred miles from Blomidon to Digby Gut (the gate in the wall which admits the flood that forms Annapolis Basin). Between North and South Mountain, the latter extends from Horton to Bear River, reposes the plain made fruitful by the beneficent mud of tidal rivers. From a tower on the outstanding ledge of Look-off we see into five counties. Kings, Hants, Annapolis, Cumberland and Colchester, and glimpse the beds or estuaries of six rivers,—the Pereau, below us, the Habitant flowing past Canning, the Canard, the Cornwallis, the Gaspereau and the distant Avon. This is the View of a Thousand Farms—farms acres-wide which from this height appear like tinted patches in which trees are silver bushes wound about by streams that gleam and waver.

If the tide is at the ebb, a ruddy margin marks the contour of the bay. At the risen tide, cliff and beach are washed high with water of a baffling hue that is neither green nor indigo, grey nor brown, but all these colours underlaid with red, and misted by a chalky radiance.