With this war spirit in our hearts, we sailed away into the British waters of the Bay of Fundy, but keeping all the morning so close to the New Brunswick shore that we could see there was nothing on it; that is, nothing that would make one wish to land.  And yet the best part of going to sea is keeping close to the shore, however tame it may be, if the weather is pleasant.  A pretty bay now and then, a rocky cove with scant foliage, a lighthouse, a rude cabin, a level land, monotonous and without noble forests,—­this was New Brunswick as we coasted along it under the most favorable circumstances.  But we were advancing into the Bay of Fundy; and my comrade, who had been brought up on its high tides in the district school, was on the lookout for this phenomenon.  The very name of Fundy is stimulating to the imagination, amid the geographical wastes of youth, and the young fancy reaches out to its tides with an enthusiasm that is given only to Fingal’s Cave and other pictorial wonders of the text-book.  I am sure the district schools would become what they are not now, if the geographers would make the other parts of the globe as attractive as the sonorous Bay of Fundy.  The recitation about that is always an easy one; there is a lusty pleasure in the mere shouting out of the name, as if the speaking it were an innocent sort of swearing.  From the Bay of Fundy the rivers run uphill half the time, and the tides are from forty to ninety feet high.  For myself, I confess that, in my imagination, I used to see the tides of this bay go stalking into the land like gigantic waterspouts; or, when I was better instructed, I could see them advancing on the coast like a solid wall of masonry eighty feet high.  “Where,” we said, as we came easily, and neither uphill nor downhill, into the pleasant harbor of St. John,—–­“where are the tides of our youth?”

They were probably out, for when we came to the land we walked out upon the foot of a sloping platform that ran into the water by the side of the piles of the dock, which stood up naked and blackened high in the air.  It is not the purpose of this paper to describe St. John, nor to dwell upon its picturesque situation.  As one approaches it from the harbor it gives a promise which its rather shabby streets, decaying houses, and steep plank sidewalks do not keep.  A city set on a hill, with flags flying from a roof here and there, and a few shining spires and walls glistening in the sun, always looks well at a distance.  St. John is extravagant in the matter of flagstaffs; almost every well-to-do citizen seems to have one on his premises, as a sort of vent for his loyalty, I presume.  It is a good fashion, at any rate, and its more general adoption by us would add to the gayety of our cities when we celebrate the birthday of the President.  St. John is built on a steep sidehill, from which it would be in danger of sliding off, if its houses were not mortised into the solid rock.  This makes the house-foundations secure, but the labor