The village was re-awakening for the evening festivities. Farmers in for the day were removing nose-bags from horses' heads, whilst their wives tucked baskets into the clumsy waggons. To avoid them, Paul walked towards the marshes, crossed the trestle and made his way to the waterside. Ravaged by the ardours of the July sun, the sky was drawing blue veils across its pallid face. At the deserted shipyard, which presumably belonged to him, Paul sat on a broken keel and gazed across the river towards the mill.
Not a vessel was in port, though a clumsy tug, taking advantage of the tide from the Basin, was puffing her way around the bend with two empty white scows to be laden with gypsum. Poor little mud-red river, in which his forefathers had cast anchor on portentous arrivals from Saint Nazaire, Cienfuegos, Rotterdam, Madras. They had all "sold their farms to go to sea," and for their pains had died of yellow fever, or foundered, or become obliterated in far ends of the earth. Like himself that ghostly legion had been familiar with forepeaks and caustic, scraping irons and oakum, lime juice, salt "horse," and icy shrouds that rattled to the macabre tune of Atlantic gales. From them he had inherited a dauntlessness of spirit, a need to navigate the bounding main of thought and feeling, a hatred of staying put. But from vague sources that had persisted from the days when Nova Scotia was Acadie, a fraction of what Voltaire disdainfully called (and it was rather a gaffe) quelques arpents de neige, he had inherited traits of a different order. To him, as to Aunt Verona, had been bequeathed artistic heirlooms, and he was at times chilled with the fear that he had inherited a share of the fatalism that had blighted his aunt's career.
From the keel on which he was mounted he could see in the clear air of gathering night a sharp silhouette of Evangeline's Blomidon, and it was an easy boat-run
