The eastern boundary of Nova Scotia is the Canso Strait, separating it from Cape Breton Island. At Canso, its southern entrance, various Atlantic cables are landed, while others go off southward to New York. This strait is a picturesque waterway, fifteen miles long and about a mile wide, a highway of commerce for the shipping desirous of avoiding the long passage around Cape Breton, and it is called by its admirers "The Golden Gate of the St. Lawrence Gulf." The geologists describe it as a narrow transverse valley excavated by the powerful currents of the drift period. As it leads directly from the Atlantic Ocean into the Gulf, more vessels are said to pass it than any other strait excepting Gibraltar. It has several villages upon the shores, mainly with Scottish inhabitants, the chief being Port Hawkesbury, Port Mulgrave and Port Hastings, the latter a point for gypsum export. Cape Breton Island is about one hundred miles long and eighty miles wide, its greatest natural feature being the famous "Arm of Gold," thus named in admiration by the early French explorers. Nearly one-half the surface of the island is occupied by the lakes and swamps of this "Bras d'Or," an extensive and almost tideless inland sea of salt water, ramifying with deep bays and long arms through the centre, having two large openings into the sea at its northeastern end, and almost communicating with the Atlantic on its southwestern corner. This "Arm of Gold" has fine scenery, and presents within the rocky confines of the island a large lake, the Great Bras d'Or, where the mariner gets almost out of sight of land. To the southward of Cape Breton Island is Arichat, or the Isle Madame, having the Lennox Passage between, this Isle being inhabited by a colony of French Acadian fishermen. Originally this region was colonized by the Count de Fronsac, Sieur Denys, the first French Governor of Cape Breton, in whose honor they always called the Canso Strait the Passage Fronsac, though since then its present title was adopted, being derived from the Micmac name of Camsoke, meaning "facing the frowning cliffs." Each little French settlement here, as on the St. Lawrence, has the white cottages clustering around the church with the tall spire, and the curé's house not far away, usually the most elaborate in the settlement. From the Lennox Passage a short canal has been cut through the rocks into the southwestern extremity of the Bras d'Or, thus actually dividing Cape Breton into two islands.