It would be unfair to hold you responsible for these light sketches of a
summer trip, which are now gathered into this little volume in response
to the usual demand in such cases; yet you cannot escape altogether. For
it was you who first taught me to say the name Baddeck; it was you who
showed me its position on the map, and a seductive letter from a home
missionary on Cape Breton Island, in relation to the abundance of trout
and salmon in his field of labor. That missionary, you may remember, we
never found, nor did we see his tackle; but I have no reason to believe
that he does not enjoy good fishing in the right season. You understand
the duties of a home missionary much better than I do, and you know
whether he would be likely to let a couple of strangers into the best
part of his preserve.
But I am free to admit that after our expedition was started you
speedily relieved yourself of all responsibility for it, and turned
it over to your comrade with a profound geographical indifference; you
would as readily have gone to Baddeck by Nova Zembla as by Nova Scotia.
The flight over the latter island was, you knew, however, no part of our
original plan, and you were not obliged to take any interest in it.
You know that our design was to slip rapidly down, by the back way of
Northumberland Sound, to the Bras d'Or, and spend a week fishing there;
and that the greater part of this journey here imperfectly described
is not really ours, but was put upon us by fate and by the peculiar
arrangement of provincial travel.
It would have been easy after our return to have made up from libraries
a most engaging description of the Provinces, mixing it with historical,
legendary, botanical, geographical, and ethnological information, and
seasoning it with adventure from your glowing imagination. But it
seemed to me that it would be a more honest contribution if our account
contained only what we saw, in our rapid travel; for I have a theory
that any addition to the great body of print, however insignificant
it may be, has a value in proportion to its originality and
individuality,--however slight either is,--and very little value if it
is a compilation of the observations of others. In this case I know
how slight the value is; and I can only hope that as the trip was very
entertaining to us, the record of it may not be wholly unentertaining to
those of like tastes.
Of one thing, my dear friend, I am certain: if the readers of this
little journey could have during its persual the companionship that the
writer had when it was made, they would think it altogether delightful.
There is no pleasure comparable to that of going about the world, in
pleasant weather, with a good comrade, if the mind is distracted neither
by care, nor ambition, nor the greed of gain. The delight there is
in seeing things, without any hope of pecuniary profit from them! We
certainly enjoyed that inward peace which the philosopher associates
with the absence of desire for money. For, as Plato says in the Phaedo,
“whence come wars and fightings and factions? whence but from the
body and the lusts of the body? For wars are occasioned by the love of
money.” So also are the majority of the anxieties of life. We left
these behind when we went into the Provinces with no design of acquiring
anything there. I hope it may be my fortune to travel further with you
in this fair world, under similar circumstances.
NOOK FARM, HARTFORD, April 10, 1874.