Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/75

Rh Brunswick. The North Shore of Prince Edward Island is pierced by idyllic bays where mermen and maids disport in calm waters or play porpoise among the Gulf breakers. The summer towns below St. John and those which. front the Bay Chaleur nearly all have broad, safe beaches.

The "ball play" of the Indians, whose implements were one or two rackets and a ball of deerskin stuffed with moss, was the forerunner of lacrosse, the national game of Canada. The latter's prestige is menaced by the increasing interest in baseball w.hich is fast becoming the most popular athletic pastime of Maritime youths. Games of base-ball played on empty lots and association grounds are as wranglingly contested as in the country of its origin. In a meadow near the Inch Arran, on the shore of Bay Chaleur, the writer once witnessed a really ferocious exhibition between town boys from Dalhousie and juvenile guests of the hotel, resident in Ottawa and Montreal, the latter protesting that base-ball as played in northern New Brunswick was not in strict compliance with American league rules.

Golf, tennis, cricket, quoits and foot-ball, in the milder months of the year; hockey, curling, skating, skiing, ice-boating and tobogganing in the winter complete the list of open-air sports in the Provinces. The Studley Quoit Club, organised at Halifax in 1858, pitches Saturday afternoons. The colours are "green for the grass, blue for the