Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/291

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
ST. JOHN AND THE SOUTH COAST
239

until a year later that the settlement first called for Governor Parr took the name of its river.

"The scenery around St. John," says an oldtime writer, "possesses nothing indicative of the fertile regions to which it leads." In truth the city is builded on rock whose acclivities have defied time and the blaster. Ecclesiastical towers crown the dun pile of buildings which rises from the harbour-front to the long rolling crest that looks off to the Bay of Fundy. Steamers land at Reed's Point at the end of Prince William Street. The latter thoroughfare, which shows an imposing row of façades belonging to commercial and government buildings, terminates in the market-place at the foot of King Street. The tram line crosses the same open space coming from the Union Station and runs up the King Street hill past the Tourist Bureau, railway ticket offices, shops, banks and the Royal and Victoria Hotels. The progress of this wide main street is interrupted at Charlotte Street by King Square. Principal stores and theatres, and many of the city's best churches and residences are within four blocks of this shady plaza. A little to the east is the plot where the Fathers of St. John buried their dead. Children roll their hoops and nursery-maids trundle perambulators down paths edged with sunken stones which present to the curious eye archaic tributes carved a century and more ago.

The Loyalist Church stood on the opposite side