I like this bed-room of mine at the Waverley, with its blue and white striped curtain at the window, through which the gas-lights of Halifax streets appear in lucid spots, as I wait for Henry, with the candles. Now I am no longer alone. I shut my chamber door, as it were, upon one world, only that I may enjoy another. So I trim the candles, and spread out the writing materials, and at once the characters of two centuries ago awake, and their life to me is as the life of to-day. There is nothing more captivating in literature, than the narrative of some heroic deed of woman. Very few such are recorded; how many might be, if the actors themselves had not shunned notoriety, and "uncommended died," rather than encounter the ordeal of public praise? Of such the poet has written: "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air." Of such, many have lived and died, to live again only in fiction; whereas their own true histories would have been greater than the inventions of authors. We read of heroes laden with the "glittering spoils of empire," but the heroic deeds of woman are oftentimes, all in all, as great, without the glitter; without the pomp and pageantry of triumphal processions; without the pealing trumpet of renown. Boadicea, chained to the car of Suetonius, is the too common memorial of heroic womanity. The story I relate is but a transcript, a mere episode in the sad history of Acadia: yet the record will be pleasing to those who estimate the merits of brave women. This, then, is the legend of MARIE DE LA TOUR. In the year 1621, Sir William Alexander, afterwards Earl of Sterling,[B] a romantic poet, and favorite of King James I., was presented by that monarch with a patent to all the land known as Acadia, in the Americas. Royalty in those days made out its parchment deeds for a province, without taking the trouble to search the record office, to see if there were any prior liens upon the territory. The good old rule obtained thus-- "That they may take who have the power, And they may keep who can." or, to quote the words of another writer-- "For the time once was here, to all be it known, That all a man sailed by or saw was his own." It is due to Sir William Alexander to say that he gave the province the proud name which at present it enjoys, of Nova Scotia, or New Scotland, a title much more appropriate than that of "Acadia,"[C] which to us means nothing. [B] This William Alexander, Earl of Sterling, was the ancestor of General Lord Sterling, one of the most distinguished officers in the American Revolution. [C] The name "Acadia," is, no doubt, a primitive word, from the Abenaqui tongue--we find it repeated in _Tracadie_, _Shubenacadie_, and elsewhere in the province.