Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/138

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104
THE TOURIST'S MARITIME PROVINCES

ity." George William Curtis decried the Sam Slick creations as "extravaganzas . . . drawn without skill or sympathy."

Certainly, natives of the United States have cause to deplore the vogue of the slangy, cheating braggart who for nearly a century has biassed European judgment in determining "the American type."

In his preface to The Old Judge, or Life in a Colony (American edition, 1849), Haliburton accounts for the derivation of the term "Blue Nose" as applied to the Nova Scotians. He affirms it to be "a sobriquet acquired from a superior potato of that name, of the good qualities of which he (the Nova Scotian) is never tired of talking, being anxious, like most men of small property, to exhibit to the best advantage the little he had." In confirmation of this theory we have an old invoice which records the shipment to Boston in the year 1787 of a consignment of potatoes which consisted in part of "roses" and "blue noses." The name is given to all Nova Scotians but especially, says another writer, to that portion of the population descended from the pre-loyalists, that is, those who emigrated from New England before and during the Revolutionary War, as distinguished from those who came after it.

To the tourist the most telling possession of the old green town of Windsor is the ruined rampart on the rise above the railway station. Fort Ed-