The gateway to the sea lies through a narrow gorge of less than five hundred feet, and here the current of the river makes fierce and constant struggle with the force of the famous tides of the Bay of Fundy. At St. John the normal rise is twenty-seven feet, and the result is the curious, but not quite happily-named phenomenon—the “Reversing Falls.” At low tide the river tumbles and races in fierce haste down a sharp rugged slope to reach the bay; but the pressure of the incoming sea piles up the water of the harbour in the narrow channel to greater and greater heights, till, at the flood, the current of the St. John seems turned backward, and the tide water, as it comes plunging through the rock gateway, is at a distinctly higher level than the more peaceful surface of the river within. Happily at half-tide—four times in the twenty-four hours—there comes a brief truce in the everlasting struggle, and vessels can pass with safety to bear their freight of humankind and of all manner of merchandise up the grand natural highway of nature’s making deep into the heart of the country. I do not propose here to dwell at any length on the history of New Brunswick; but I should like to say that, in common with every other province of the Dominion, it has a history—short in years, perhaps, but not devoid of human interest. If one were attempting to tell it, moreover, it would be impossible to do so without frequent references to the St. John. This river received its name three centuries ago because a little company of gallant French explorers, amongst whom was Samuel Champlain, afterwards founder of Quebec, discovered it upon St. John the Baptist’s day. In those old days, the broad bosom of the river was often flecked with the canoes of Indians, bound on some hunting or fishing or fighting expedition; and in 1635 a picturesque French trader—such a one of gentle birth, gift of leadership, and bold, adventurous spirit, as Sir Walter Scott might have loved to portray—built a huge wooden castle, bastioned and palisaded, on the banks of the St. John. There was enacted a fierce, confused drama, in which Indians and priests and rival gentlemen-traders took part; nor did it want a heroine, and to this day the noble courage and tragic end of Lady La Tour—wife of the lord of the castle—fascinate the imagination of every student of the annals of old Acadia. In La Tour’s lifetime an expedition sent out by Oliver Cromwell captured the fort on the St. John, and for some fifteen years the English held the river, restoring it to France by the Treaty of Breda. After that, great grants were made to French seigniors, but they contented themselves with trading with the Indians instead of improving the land, and the French settlements in what is now New Brunswick were of little account till after the expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia in 1755.