The formation around the head of the Bay of Fundy is largely of rich and fertile red lowlands, marsh and meadow, much of it being reclaimed by dyking. The same formation is carried over the Chignecto isthmus, east of the bay, where the Nova Scotia Peninsula is joined to the mainland. This is only seventeen miles wide, and across it has been projected the "Chignecto Ship Railway," designed to shorten by about five hundred miles the passage of vessels around the Nova Scotia Peninsula into the St. Lawrence. It is a system of railway tracks on which the design was to carry ships over the isthmus. Vessels of two thousand tons were to be lifted out of the water, placed in a huge cradle, and drawn across by locomotives. The project, estimated as costing $5,000,000, was stopped in partial completion for want of funds. On the meadow land to the southward of the Basin of Minas is Windsor on the Avon, a small shipping town, in which the most famous building near the river is a broad and oddly-constructed one-story house, called the Clifton Mansion, which was the home of the author of _Sam Slick_--Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, a native of Windsor, who died in 1865. Beyond is Ardoise Mountain, rising seven hundred feet and having on its northern verge the great Aylesford sand-plain whereof _Sam Slick_ says: "Plain folks call it, in a gin'ral way, the Devil's Goose Pasture. It is thirteen miles long and seven miles wide; it ain't just drifting sands, but it's all but that, it's so barren. It's uneven or wavy, like the swell of the sea in a calm, and it's covered with short, thin, dry, coarse grass, and dotted here and there with a half-starved birch and a stunted, misshapen spruce. It is just about as silent and lonesome and desolate a place as you would wish to see. All that country thereabout, as I have heard tell when I was a boy, was once owned by the Lord, the king and the devil. The glebe-lands belonged to the first, the ungranted wilderness-lands to the second, and the sand-plain fell to the share of the last--and people do say the old gentleman was rather done in the division, but that is neither here nor there--and so it is called to this day the Devil's Goose Pasture." Over this sand-plain and the rocky, desolate ridge beyond, runs the great railway train of the Provinces, on the route between St. John and Halifax--dignified by the title of the "Flying Bluenose." It crosses the bleak flanks of Ardoise Mountain and Mount Uniacke, with its gold mines, through a region which the local chronicler describes as having "admirable facilities for the pasturage of goats and the procuring of ballast for breakwaters;" and then comes to the pleasant shores of Bedford Basin, running several miles along its beautiful western bank down to Halifax harbor. THE GREAT BRITISH-AMERICAN FORTRESS.