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THE GOLD-FIELDS OF NOVA SCOTIA.

It will probably be thought a startling statement, by the good people of our staid Northern metropolis,—­certainly by those of them whose attention has not been called to the recent developments on this subject,—­that within thirty-six hours’ travel from their own doors, by conveyance as safe and even luxurious as any in the world, there exist veins of auriferous quartz, practically inexhaustible in extent, teeming throughout with virgin gold of a standard of almost absolute purity, and yielding a return to the labors of the scientific miner, rivalling, if not fairly surpassing, in their comparative results, the richest deposits of California, Colorado, and Australia.

But then, if one has a startling fact to tell, why is it not best to tell it out, all at once, and in a startling manner?  If the house-maid of our modest menage should on a sudden discover that Aladdin’s lamp had come home from the auction-room among some chance purchases of her mistress, and that the slave or genie thereof was actually standing in the middle of our own kitchen-floor at the moment, and grumbling audibly at lack of employment in fetching home diamonds and such like delicacies by the bale for the whole household, could we reasonably expect the girl to announce the fact, in the parlor above, in the same tone in which she ordinarily states that the butcher has called for his orders?  Aesop, in his very first fable, (as arranged by good Archdeacon Croxall,) has inculcated but a mean opinion of the cock who forbore to crow lustily when he turned up a jewel of surpassing richness, in the course of his ordinary scratching, and under his own very beak; why, then, should we render ourselves liable to the same depreciatory moral?  Something, at least, must be pardoned to the certaminis gaudia of this new-found contest with the secrets of Nature,—­and though the fact we have stated be a startling one, the statements and authorities which go to support it will, perhaps, in the end, surprise us still more.  We shall give them, at any rate, in such a form as “to challenge investigation and to defy scrutiny.”  How far they will bear out our sensational opening paragraph, then, the readers of the “Atlantic” cannot choose but judge.

But let us hasten, in the very outset, to warn the individual gold-hunter that he, at least, will get no crumb of comfort from these pages.  That the precious metal is there,—­to use Dr. Johnson’s expression, “the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice,”—­no one, we think, after reading what we have now to offer, will be inclined to deny.  But it is to be sought successfully, as we shall show, only by the expenditure of capital, and under the direction of science and the most experienced skill.  The solitary adventurer may tickle the stern ribs of Acadia with his paltry hoe and pick in vain,—­she will laugh for