Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/273

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NORTHERN NOVA SCOTIA
223

sengers from the Richmond and Weymouth are transferred, and later crosses Barra Strait in time to meet the express trains from Sydney, Point Tupper and Halifax. The voyage of 12 miles is a delightful prologue to the divertissement of shores "bold enough to be striking, rounded enough to be winsome," staged by the Master Artist about Baddeck.

The little steamer holds its course well on the Victoria County side of the border-line which runs through the Lake and bisects the Island. The Boisdale Hills rise in the east in the County of Cape Breton. Baddeck remains so enticingly hidden as to recall the cunning with which it beckoned its most distinguished celebrant and advertiser, the late Mr. Warner.[1] He approached "Scotch Baddeck" by road from Whycocomagh. From the steamer-deck we view it first through the entry that has for its left portal the light-house point and for its right, green-clad Beinn-Bhreagh, the Beautiful Mountain chosen by Alexander Graham Bell as his summer estate. The Gaelic village is only a stratum of plain wooden houses laid between hill and rimpled bay, but the atmosphere peculiar to this lake o' the ocean veils it with glamorous blue. The water in the foreground makes a mirror for gliding sail-boats and for the over-hanging boughs of craig and islet. Launches,

  1. Baddeck and That Sort of Thing first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly as a serial in 1874.