lumber barges, schooners, yachts share with our steamer the water-passage which opens to new bays on the west and to the long channels on the north and east which bound Boularderie Island. A row of summer villas graces an outlying bank of the harbour. The town itself is without distinction. One shambling street contains stores and hotels interspersed with houses and white churches. On side hills there are more churches and commonplace dwellings with flower-gardens. Only as the nucleus of radiating excursions can we grant Baddeck's pretensions as a summer resort: for its environment and for one other reason, its faultless summer climate. Wherefore, the liveliness of the New Bras d'Or, a hotel now more in favour than the Telegraph which Warner praised, and the air of affluence about the shops affected by holiday traffic. "With such weather perpetual and such scenery always present, sin," thought Warner, "would soon become an impossibility."
The Bras d'Or banks and hillocks were settled by Highlanders who came between the years 1802 and 1828. It is their descendants who fill the kirk on Sundays, attired in the traditional black and serious to the point of oppression. If the service be full Gaelic, not only the sermon but the singing is delivered in the throaty unmelodious tongue of the Scottish hills. Behind the intrenchment of the pulpit sit the choir and a precentor. The tune is started without the aid of worldly instrument.
