Digby is within the Gut, fronted by a long and tall wooden wharf that has to deal with fifty feet of tide, its end being an enormous square timber crib, built up like a four-story house. The town is noted for luscious cherries and for "Digby Chickens," the most prized brand of herrings cured by the "Blue-noses," and it has also developed into quite an attractive watering-place. To the southwestward a railway runs to Yarmouth, at the western extremity of Nova Scotia, a small but very busy port, having steamer lines in various directions. To the northeastward Annapolis Basin stretches sixteen miles between the enclosing hills, gradually narrowing towards the extremity. Here, on the lowlands adjoining Annapolis River, is the quaint little town of Annapolis Royal and the extensive ramparts of the ancient fort that guarded it, covering some thirty acres. This was the original French capital of Acadia, and the first permanent settlement made by Europeans in America north of St. Augustine, De Monts founding the colony in 1605. He named it Port Royal, but the English Puritans a century later changed this, in honor of their "good Queen Anne," to Annapolis Royal. Almost from the first settlement to the final capture by the Puritan expedition from Boston in 1710, its history was a tale of battles, sieges and captures by many chieftains of the rival nations. As the Marquis of Lorne in his Canadian book describes it: "This is the story which is repeated with varying incidents through all the long-drawn coasts of the old Acadia. We see, first, the forest village of the Red Indians, with its stockades and patches of maize around it; then the landing from the ships, under the white flag sown with golden lilies, of armored arquebussiers and spearsmen; the skirmishing and the successful French settlement; to be followed by the coming of other ships, with the red cross floating over the high-built sterns, and then the final conflict and the victory of the British arms." Now everything is peaceful, and the people raise immense crops of the most attractive apples for shipment to Europe. East of Annapolis is the "Garden of Nova Scotia." The long ridge of the North Mountain on the coast screens it from the cold winds and fogs, while the parallel ridge of the South Mountain stretches for eighty miles, and between these noble ranges, which are described as "most gracefully moulded," is a broad and rich intervale extending to the Basin of Minas and the land of Evangeline, which Longfellow has made so sadly poetical. Good crops of hay grow on the fertile red soils, which the farmers gather with their slowly-plodding ox-teams; and of this region the poet sang mournfully: