mole, is the town famous alike as a fishing and as a cable station.
It was the New Englanders' smacks which went out from Canso that the French molested. Louisbourg, on the Isle Royale, was the price they paid for their zeal. The present fleet of well over a hundred schooners fish the teeming banks that lie a few miles out in the Atlantic and bring in rich cargoes of cod, haddock, mackerel and halibut. Shore "hand-liners" fish from motor-boats and sometimes clear $80 a week. From the Canso lobster hatchery as many as 8,000,000 fry are sometimes despatched at one time.
Because of its out-standing position Canso was chosen by both the Commercial and the Western Union Cable Companies as a terminus on this side of the Atlantic. The cable buildings and the houses of the officials, operators and mechanicians form a fair-sized colony in themselves.
At the entrance to Canso Gut, two hours' sail from Mulgrave, and separated from Cape Breton's southern shore by a slender passage is a halcyon isle of poppy zephyrs, of glistening roads, blue tarns and murmuring beaches that, two centuries and more a-gone, was bequeathed the title customarily given at that time to the eldest daughters of the Kings of France. Isle Madame hoards its fund of story and its reminiscence of years when Arichat was the jauntiest port on the coast, when wharves were alive with brigs, brigantines, shallops
