CAPE BRETON

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22608, 27 June 1935, Page 16

CAPE BRETON

AN ISLAND OF CHARM WIDE REPUTATION. I Islands have always appealed to the human race. Whether this is because islands have an air of exclusiveness which flatters human pride, or because pirates employ them as safe-deposit boxes, which encourages human hopes of gain, I cannot go into here, writes T. Morris-Longstretk in the Christian Science Monitor. Suffice it to say that Dr Weagle and I seemed to breathe a lighter air as our train ploughed the. waters of the Strait of Canso towards the island of Cape Breton. We had again entrained at Mulgrave. The cars had been pushed aboard' a ferry boat, for the crossing of this tidal sweep which is from half a mile to a mile wide and busy with ocean liners is no matter of bridge and rail. Doubtless a tunnel will solve the problem of this gulf in the golden era of greater traffic to come. The world's one -concern is to eliminate pauses. People are now as worried by five minutes to spare as they used to be by the plague. Inaction is the page on which the gods record their finest thoughts. But mo9t travellers would rather forgo thinking than lose 40 seconds. The fact that it suited me perfectly to chug across the strait, fixing the outline of the hills in my memory, instead of whizzing over it, classes me at once .with the doctor, Queen Victoria and the stage coach ... i . SMOLLETT'S STORY. It is not everyone who is smart enough to know that Cape Breton is an island. George 11, as one would suspect of those early Georges, was ignorant of the fact. Smollett makes a certain Captain C—■ — tell this anecdote of his Majesty and his Majesty's enlightened Minister, the Duke of Newcastle: — ' In the beginning of the war this poor half-witted creature told me in a great fright that 30,000 French had marched from Acadie to Cape Breton. "Where did they find transports?" said I. t "Transports!" cried he, "I tell yon they marched by land." "By land to the island of Cape Breton* " . . "What! Is Cape Breton an island?" ' " Certainly." "Ha! You are sure of that?" When I pointed it out on the map, he examined it earnestly with his spectacles; then, taking me in his arms, "My dear C ," cried he, " you always bring us good news. I'll go directly and tell the King that Cape Breton is an island." We shook the dust of land-travel once more from our garments at lona and boarded a boat for Baddeck, and the first tiling a stranger should know about Baddeck is its pronunciation. You come down heavily on its last syllable, as heavily as on the first of Antigonish. These two words kept me very busy, and the third one to bother me was Cape Breton itself. The natives say Cape Briton, a slight but very genuine loss to the sensitive ear. The interior of Cape Breton is a group of valleys sunk below the sea and named Bras d'Or by that rtice which has a genius for the exquisite. A UNIT. For years I had heard about these arms of the sleeping sea, whose tidal rise is n mere 18 inches, a mere sight of old ocean slumbering between the hills. I had been led to conjure scenes of sylvan tranquility drowsing beside the marine depths. People here, peopl.e there, had spoken in disjoined syllables of dark glens and painted mountainsides, of crystal deeps and retreating distances. They said that the sunsets mirrored on the Bras Or bosom, girt by its corslet of rusty rock, rose to a higher degree of the inexpressible than anywhere else. They assured me that people with a continentide reputation for assessing beauty light have vacillated for a moment over the claims of other lake-lands, but only for a moment. Then they had anchored for ever by the promontories of the Bras d'Or, convinced that here was the final splendour. Therefore to admit that I was not disappointed on that late afternoon sail across the Bras d'Or is certainly to admit a high degree of loveliness in the scene In retrospect, Cape Breton is a unit for me in which the Bras d'Or Lakes are the living heart. Cape Breton is a unit as various and beguiling in its beauty as the calendar, and in its calen- ■■ the Bras d'Or region corresponds to the month of June; Baddeck is its capial, and Baddeck is the sort of place where one instantly begins to plan a home.