of blasting out streets is considerable.  We note these things complacently as we toil in the sun up the hill to the Victoria Hotel, which stands well up on the backbone of the ridge, and from the upper windows of which we have a fine view of the harbor, and of the hill opposite, above Carleton, where there is the brokenly truncated ruin of a round stone tower.  This tower was one of the first things that caught our eyes as we entered the harbor.  It gave an antique picturesqueness to the landscape which it entirely wanted without this.  Round stone towers are not so common in this world that we can afford to be indifferent to them.  This is called a Martello tower, but I could not learn who built it.  I could not understand the indifference, almost amounting to contempt, of the citizens of St. John in regard to this their only piece of curious antiquity.  “It is nothing but the ruins of an old fort,” they said; “you can see it as well from here as by going there.”  It was, however, the one thing at St. John I was determined to see.  But we never got any nearer to it than the ferry-landing.  Want of time and the vis inertia of the place were against us.  And now, as I think of that tower and its perhaps mysterious origin, I have a longing for it that the possession of nothing else in the Provinces could satisfy.

But it must not be forgotten that we were on our way to Baddeck; that the whole purpose of the journey was to reach Baddeck; that St. John was only an incident in the trip; that any information about St. John, which is here thrown in or mercifully withheld, is entirely gratuitous, and is not taken into account in the price the reader pays for this volume.  But if any one wants to know what sort of a place St. John is, we can tell him:  it is the sort of a place that if you get into it after eight o’clock on Wednesday morning, you cannot get out of it in any direction until Thursday morning at eight o’clock, unless you want to smuggle goods on the night train to Bangor.  It was eleven o’clock Wednesday forenoon when we arrived at St. John.  The Intercolonial railway train had gone to Shediac; it had gone also on its roundabout Moncton, Missaquat River, Truro, Stewiack, and Shubenacadie way to Halifax; the boat had gone to Digby Gut and Annapolis to catch the train that way for Halifax; the boat had gone up the river to Frederick, the capital.  We could go to none of these places till the next day.  We had no desire to go to Frederick, but we made the fact that we were cut off from it an addition to our injury.  The people of St. John have this peculiarity:  they never start to go anywhere except early in the morning.