As I followed on, I heard the two children, who were walking behind, saying to each other, “Wouldn’t that have been too bad?  Mamma liked them so much, and we never could have got so many all at once again.”

“Yes, we could, too, next summer,” said the boy, sturdily.

They are sure of their “next summers,” I think, all six of those souls,—­children, and mother, and father.  They may never again gather so many ox-eye daisies and buttercups “all at once.”  Perhaps some of the little hands have already picked their last flowers.  Nevertheless, their summers are certain.  To such souls as these, all trees, either here or in God’s larger country, are Trees of Life, with twelve manner of fruits and leaves for healing; and it is but little change from the summers here, whose suns burn and make weary, to the summers there, of which “the Lamb is the light.”

Heaven bless them all, wherever they are.

Children in Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia is a country of gracious surprises.  Instead of the stones which are what strangers chiefly expect at her hands, she gives us a wealth of fertile meadows; instead of stormy waves breaking on a frowning coast, she shows us smooth basins whose shores are soft and wooded to the water’s edge, and into which empty wonderful tidal rivers, whose courses, where the tide-water has flowed out, lie like curving bands of bright brown satin among the green fields.  She has no barrenness, no unsightliness, no poverty; everywhere beauty, everywhere riches.  She is biding her time.

But most beautiful among her beauties, most wonderful among her wonders, are her children.  During two weeks’ travel in the provinces, I have been constantly more and more impressed by their superiority in appearance, size, and health to the children of the New England and Middle States.  In the outset of our journey I was struck by it; along all the roadsides they looked up, boys and girls, fair, broad-cheeked, sturdy-legged, such as with us are seen only now and then.  I did not, however, realize at first that this was the universal law of the land, and that it pointed to something more than climate as a cause.  But the first school that I saw, en masse, gave a startling impetus to the train of observation and inference into which I was unconsciously falling.  It was a Sunday school in the little town of Wolfville, which lies between the Gaspcreau and Cornwallis rivers, just beyond the meadows of the Grand Pre, where lived Gabriel Lajeunesse, and Benedict Bellefontaine, and the rest of the “simple Acadian farmers.”

“Mists from the mighty Atlantic” more than “looked on the happy valley” that Sunday morning.  Convicting Longfellow of a mistake, they did descend “from their stations,” on solemn Blomidon, and fell in a slow, unpleasant drizzle in the streets of Wolfville and Horton.  I arrived too early at one of the village churches, and while I was waiting for a sexton a door opened,