That side, too, is the region of the salt marshes, formed by the action of those phenomenally high tides of the Bay of Fundy, which were amongst the few remarkable features of Canada thought worthy of mention in the “Geographies” put into the hands of British children a generation ago. In course of ages these mighty tides have left vast level deposits of marine mud—the salt marshes—liable to invasion of the waves at spring tides, but easily turned by a little labour into pastures and hay meadows and grain fields of almost inexhaustible fertility. All that is necessary is to build dykes or embankments of tree trunks and clay to keep back the highest tides; and this work was begun long ago by some of the early French immigrants, who had been accustomed to reclaiming land from the sea in their own country. If, at any time, the fields should show signs of exhaustion, the fertilizing waters may again be let in for a short season; indeed, farmers living near undyked marshes are accustomed to haul loads of the precious sea-mud to their upland fields. Of something the same character as the dyked lands are the “intervales” along the rivers, which are said to be “invariably rich and productive.” The abundance of pasturage and hay makes good dairying, and Nova Scotia is emphatically a country of mixed farming. Almost all crops suited to a temperate climate can be grown in some part of the province. But, during a recent year, of all agricultural products, hay brought most money into the farmers’ pockets; then came live stock products, potatoes, apples, oats, “garden truck,” and so in a descending scale. [Illustration: FISH CURING AT GUYSBORO, NOVA SCOTIA. NOTE THE SPLIT COD-FISH DRYING IN THE FOREGROUND.] Not only the farming can be described as “mixed” in Nova Scotia. The occupations of her people (in number somewhat under half a million) are also mixed; and though agriculture takes first place, fishing, lumbering, mining and manufacturing are of importance, all the great industries setting “new records” last year. In fishing, Nova Scotia was long the leading province of the Dominion, but in 1912, British Columbia, with her immense catch of salmon, stepped before her. In the Atlantic province, though the lobster fishery is valuable and is to the dwellers on the sterile southern coast the chief source of ready money, the cod fishery is worth most of all, a fact quaintly recognized by the habit of the shore people of referring to a cod as “a fish,” and to all others of the finny tribe by their specific names of haddock, halibut and so forth. The fishing hamlets consist of little whitewashed cottages dotted at random about the weather-beaten rocks, beside the fine natural harbours or little coves where the boats run in for shelter, alongside ramshackle stages where the cod are dried in the open air, and by fish-houses, often emitting the peculiarly horrible odour of over-kept “bait.”