Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
in the orifice; not, however, the one originally sent there by the
cannoneers. Relic-hunters visiting the place have a habit of
clandestinely appropriating the cannon-ball, so the sexton, with an
eye to business, has some on hand ready to put into the cavity, and
thus maintain the old church's patriotic reputation. A novel sight in
Norfolk is its market, largely served by negroes--old "mammies" with
bright bandannas tied about their heads and guarding piles of luscious
fruits; funny little pickaninnies who execute all manner of athletic
gyrations for stray pennies, queer old market wagons, profusions of
flowers, and such a collection of the good things of life, all set in
a picture so attractive that the sight is long remembered.
THE EASTERN SHORE.
Northward from Old Point Comfort and Hampton Roads the great
Chesapeake Bay stretches for two hundred miles. It bisects Virginia
and Maryland, and receives the rivers of both States, extending within
fourteen miles of Pennsylvania, where it has as its head the greatest
river of all, the Susquehanna, which the Indians appropriately called
their "great island river." Its shores enclose many islands, and are
indented with innumerable bays and inlets, the alluvial soils being
readily adapted to fruit and vegetable growing, and its multitudes of
shallows being almost throughout a vast oyster bed. It has, all about,
the haunts of wild fowl and the nestling-places of delicious fish.
These shores were the home--first on the eastern side and afterwards
on the western--of the Nanticokes, or "tidewater Indians," who
ultimately migrated to New York to join the Iroquois or Five Nations,
making that Confederacy the "Six Nations." From Cape Charles, guarding
the northern entrance to the Bay, extends northward the well-known
peninsula of the "Eastern Shore," a land of market gardens,
strawberries and peaches, which feeds the Northern cities, and having
its railroad, a part of the Pennsylvania system, running for miles
over the level surface in a flat country, which enabled the builders
to lay a mathematically straight pair of rails for nearly ninety
miles, said to be the longest railway tangent in existence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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