Parsboro, a village on the north shore of the Basin, enjoys more than its share of broad, gravelly beach, overhung with clifted and woody bluffs. One fresh from the dead walls of a great city would be delighted with the sylvan shores of Parsboro. The beach, with all its breadth, a miracle of pebbly beauty, slants steeply to the surf, which is now rolling up in curling clouds of green and white. Here we turn westward into the great bay itself, going with a tide that rushes like a mighty river toward a cataract, whirling, boiling, breaking in half moons of crispy foam. Behind us is the blue reach of Chignecto Bay, the northern of the two long and winding horns of the main body of water, up which it would be play for a fortnight to hunt romantic scenery, and witness the “bore,” that most brilliant of all tidal displays.
Here is a broad sea, moving with strange velocity for a sea. The prospect to the south is singularly fine. Nova Scotia, sloping from the far-off sky gently down to the shores, its fields and villages and country dwellings gleaming in the warm noon-day, or darkening in the shadow of a transient cloud—a contrast to the northern, New Brunswick coast, iron-bound and covered with dark forests. Drops from a coming shower are wasting their sweet freshness upon the briny deep, an agreeable discord in the common music of the day, and chime in, among pleasant incidents, with the talk of the Prince Edward’s man, and the sparkling conversation of the Newfoundland gentleman. “And so sail we” into the harbor of St. Johns, the last of the waters of this divine apostle, in time for supper and a pleasant ramble about the city. You might call it the city of hills.
THURSDAY, _July 28, 1859_. St. Johns, N. B. This is my last date, and I write it out in full, in the light of a fine morning, on the deck of the steamer for Portland. The coast of Maine, truly picturesque as it is, with its rocky points, lake-like bays, and islands bristling in their dark evergreens like porcupines, and particularly Mount Desert Island and Frenchman’s Bay, is the mildest form of Newfoundland scenery as you see it on the Atlantic side, with an additional dressing of forest and vegetation, sparsely studded with towns and habitations.