Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/214

the infancy of our city, and we will take the old one first:—

Saturday night in the year 1764.—The summer sun sinks behind the western hills and the glow of the evening lights the harbor. At the landing place at Portland Point one or two fishing boats are lying on the beach, and out a little from the shore a small square sterned schooner lies at her anchor. The natural lines of the harbor are clearly seen. In many places the forest has crept down nearly to the water's edge. Wharves and shipping there are none. Ledges of rock, long since removed, crop up here and there along the harbor front. The silence falls as the days' work is ended at the little settlement, and the sound of the waters rushing through the falls seems, in the absence of other sounds, unnaturally predominant. Eastward from Portland Point we see the crags and rocks of Men-ah-quesk, their ruggedness in some measure hidden by the growth of dark spruce and graceful cedar, and in the foreground lies the graceful curve of the Upper Cove where the forest fringes the water's edge. We may easily cross in the canoe of some friendly Indian and land where, ten years later, the Loyalists landed, but we shall find there no one to welcome us. The spot is desolate, and the stillness is only broken by the occasional cry of some wild animal, the song of the bird in the forest and the ripple of the waves on the shore. The shadows deepen as we return to the Point, and soon the little windows of the settlers' houses begin to glow. There are no curtains to draw or blinds to pull down or shutters to close in these humble dwellings, but the light, though unobstructed, shines but feebly, for it is only the feeble glimmer of a tallow candle that we see, or perhaps the flickering of the firelight from the open chimney that dances on the pane.

In the homes of the settlers' Saturday night differs