attracted noted sportsmen to Bay St. Ann, where they are taken with hook and line. Three centuries and more ago French fishermen were settled here.
The wagon-road from Sydney via Big Bras d'Or village emerges at Englishtown. At this place teams are ferried a mile across St. Ann Harbour. The bold highway along the Atlantic continues to the cliffs and water-falls of Indian Brook. Twenty miles to the north, beyond Wreck Cove and Skir Dhu, rises the ruddy mountain cape called "Smoky" for the perennial wreath of fog about its thousand-foot crest. The great headland whose beauty is a tradition in Cape Breton, forms the southern bulwark of Lower Ingonish Bay, whose shores, like those of the North Bay, are sundered by precipices and bulwarked by magnificent escarpments that attain a height of 1000 to 1400 feet. At Ingonish, about 70 miles from Baddeck and from Sydney, there is a comfortable hotel. This town so gloriously environed was for long a prosperous fishing-station.
The road leaves the coast, traversing a desolate plateau all the way to Aspy Bay. The over-night stop is made at Neil's Harbour, a rugged village, 20 miles from Ingonish, and facing the sea at the end of a short by-road. Achepé is the Indian and Aspé the French name of the bay into whose blue depths crept the first trans-Atlantic cable. Here came also John Cabot, if the records read truly, and for him Sugar Loaf, highest summit of the bewildering Aspy range, is sometimes called. Pleasant lodgings await one at "Zwicker's," and a feast of mountain views. Bay St. Lawrence, behind Cape North, Land's End of Nova Scotia, is a drive of an hour or two northwest of Dingwall. Here the grandeur of the coast scenery rises to its zenith. Awful tales of wrecks and blasting storms are told about the fireplace of the hospice. Ten miles off this terrifying coast is the Island of St. Paul, whose reefs are littered with broken hulks. Due west are the Magdalen Islands.
Bay St. Lawrence, Aspy Bay, Ingonish and Bay St. Ann's are served by steamers which leave Sydney and North Sydney at regular intervals during the week.