JULES JANIN, a witty French writer, nicknamed lobsters "Naval Cardinals." He probably imagined that lobsters in the sea are as red as they are when served on our tables or placed in the windows of our fishmonger's shops. Curiously enough sailors call the ships used to carry our red-coated soldiers from one part of the world to another, lobster-boxes. Tracadie and the Trappists. The flourishing village of Tracadie, in the county of Antigonish, Eastern Nova Scotia, well sustains for its French inhabitants, the prestige, as industrious husbandmen, which their ancestors' contemporaries established in Western Nova Scotia--the land sung of by Longfellow in his "Evangeline;" and the much-vaunted superiority of the Anglo-Saxon, reads like a melancholy sarcasm, in the face of the fact that the lands from which the inoffensive Acadians were mercilessly hunted, are, to-day, far, very far, removed from the teeming fertility, which charmed the land-pirates in the last century. Simple-minded folks are wont to say, that the lands of the dispersed Acadians, languish under a curse, nor need we, of necessity, dissent from this theory, if we consider the manifestation of the curse to be shown, in a lack of skill, or industry--or mayhap both--in the descendants of those who profited by that infamous transaction. Certain it is, that these lands are now much less fertile than of yore. Arriving at Tracadie, as we drive from the Eastern Extension Railway Station, we notice as a curious coincidence of alliteration, the sign,-- +-------------------+ | HALF-WAY HOUSE. | | H. H. HARRINGTON. | +-------------------+ and remark that with the super-addition of "_Halt Here_," the signboard would be an unique curiosity. Leaving the hospitable farmhouse of Mr. DeLorey, on a bright October Sunday, after hearing Mass in the neat and commodious parish church dedicated to St. Peter, a pleasant drive of three miles, bring us to the Trappist Monastery of _Our Lady of Petit Clairvaux_, the buildings of which are of brick, and form a quadrangle, of which one side has yet to be erected. Ringing the porter's bell we are admitted and handed over to Brother Richard, the genial and amiable guest master, who is most assiduous in his attentions to us. The monastery was founded as a Priory, early in the present century by Father Vincent, a native of France, and was raised to the dignity of an abbey nine years ago, when the present Abbot, Father Dominic, was consecrated. The community at present number thirty-seven, of whom sixteen are priests and choir-religious, the remaining twenty-one being lay brothers; the monks being chiefly Belgians, with a few from Montreal, and a few from this vicinity.