Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/208

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166
THE TOURIST'S MARITIME PROVINCES

sailor accent of Devon and Cornwall. Yarmouth, though it is the channel through which pass streams of American tourists, has imbibed little from its neighbour and best patron but a certain un-British crispness in its shops.

Before the Revolutionary War, families from Cape Cod emigrated to the shore of the deeply-indented Yarmouth Sound. The name is probably descended from the River Yar in England. The Indians thought Land's End, Keespougwitk, an appropriate appellation, as do we, looking on the map. Yarmouth nourishes the tradition that "the frith" of Leif sagas "which penetrated far into the country," and the "island past which there ran strong currents" were its harbour and Bunker Island at the mouth. But it is made very clear by Scandinavian interpreters that the currents and the frith had to do with Nantucket Island and Buzzard's Bay. Leif, Erik's son, and his crew of thirty-five Icelanders did disembark on the shore they named Markland, but there is no record in the sagas that these voyagers of a thousand years ago rounded the southern coast of the Nova Scotian peninsula before continuing to Vinland the Good. Some years ago a 400-pound boulder was taken from the ground at a place opposite Yarmouth. Mysterious characters were engraved upon it which appeared to some to resemble the square letters of the runic alphabet, employed by the earliest Teutons. One Henry Phillips avowed that the sen-