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The end came in 1755 and in that season which we, who know Tatamagouche the best, love it the most. Already the nights were cooling and the morning dew was on stubble, grass and leaf. And now the Acadians could see that the sun, which in June had set over Ross’s Point, was with its daily shortening journey and its lengthening shadows setting noticeably ore Southward. For at hand was the time which Keats describes as:
On the shores and beaches the tide, as ever, flowed and ebbed, in its flood submerging the green, rank sedges heavily lodged by their weight and by driftwood and flotsam; and in its ebb, baring the soft, wide brown mud flats through which ran the sinuous courses of channel and of creek, with their sea weeds and algae clinging to rock and bar and shoal. Back in the ancient forests on the antique oaks the acorns were forming and from the quiet, solemn pines had fallen their twisted balsamic cones; on the white birches and the rock maple by the rivers, swamps and brooks and on the stately elms of the alluvian intervale, the foliage here and there was now touched with brighter colours. In the clearings and about their edges the blueberries had matured; in their briers the blackberries were ripening and the beech and hazel nuts set in their prickly armour were beginning to dry and sear; from the marshes and the mud flats came the whistle of the curlew and the call of the plover, the unfailing harbingers of Autumn; along the edges of the channels were the patient, silent herons poised for their kill while in and about the tepid water of the Rivers and of the Harbour were the diving duck and the screaming gull. Back |
