The river becomes little shortly after we leave Annapolis and beforewe reach Paradise. At this station of happy appellation we lookedfor the satirist who named it, but he has probably sold out andremoved. If the effect of wit is produced by the sudden recognitionof a remote resemblance, there was nothing witty in the naming ofthis station. Indeed, we looked in vain for the "garden" appearanceof the valley. There was nothing generous in the little meadows orthe thin orchards; and if large trees ever grew on the borderinghills, they have given place to rather stunted evergreens; thescraggy firs and balsams, in fact, possess Nova Scotia generally aswe saw it,--and there is nothing more uninteresting and wearisomethan large tracts of these woods. We are bound to believe that NovaScotia has somewhere, or had, great pines and hemlocks that murmur,but we were not blessed with the sight of them. Slightly picturesquethis valley is with its winding river and high hills guarding it, andperhaps a person would enjoy a leg-tramp down it; but, I think hewould find little peculiar or interesting after he left theneighborhood of the Basin of Minas.

Before we reached Wolfville we came in sight of this basin and someof the estuaries and streams that run into it; that is, when the tidegoes out; but they are only muddy ditches half the time. The AcadiaCollege was pointed out to us at Wolfville by a person who said thatit is a feeble institution, a remark we were sorry to hear of a placedescribed as "one of the foremost seats of learning in the Province."But our regret was at once extinguished by the announcement that thenext station was Grand Pre! We were within three miles of the mostpoetic place in North America.