HERE land meets sea, you may look for strife. They are fighters, and not since the firmament covered the earth, Flood-high, have they been at peace. Sea beats on shore and breaks it, or laps against it and slowly wears it away. Shore meets sea with a front of rock and makes spray of it, or with an earthy beach, which ever so slowly shifts out to the ocean sandbars. Thus it has been always, and always will be.

This world-old conflict has left its marks. The sea-oldest, slyest, most persistent of nature's fighters-is the most untiring and most unique of nature's artists, a freak-artist that delights in bold designs and strange effects. It cares not much for colour, which is rather a thing of the land; but it works with a free, strong hand in form, and spreads its sculptures, miles at a time, along the world's shore-line. Where sea meets land you may look always for strife and sometimes for pictures.

The chalk cliffs of Dover, signal from afar of England's coast, have been cut by wave action. They reach to a height of 320 feet, corresponding to a similar series of cliffs at Calais and Boulogne, on the French shore. At Staffa Island, on the west coast of Scotland, the waves of the Atlantic have hollowed out the wonderful Fingal's Cave, whose roof is of hard balsatic rock resting on a lava-like formation. This softer mass has given the waters their opportunity, and by long

wearing they have made a cavern 227 feet in length, with its mouth forty feet wide and more than sixty feet high. The Giant's Causeway, on the north Irish coast, is an even more remarkable formation of columnar basalt, evidently a product of volcanic action but laid bare by the water. For several miles the coast is strangely ornamented with polygonal columns, in some places from four hundred to five hundred feet high.

There is a river in Canada's storied East that winds through circling marshes and muddy banks. The Micmacs named it Pet-koat-kwee-ak, because that word means a river that bends in a bow; but the white men of a later day called it Petitcodiac, which may be taken to mean the same thing. Aside from the fact that it is one of the many place-names in New Brunswick that preserve a trace of the Indian tongue, it is a very good name; for the river, bending in its head. stretches, winds and turns in its middle course, and bends again at its mouth, where it empties into Shepody Bay, thence into Chignecto Bay, head waters of the Bay of Fundy.

The borderland of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia is a land of poetry and history. There "lie broad the Westmoreland marshes; miles on miles they extend, level and grassy, and dim, clear from the long red sweep of flats to the sky in the distance."* This is Tantramar, of many delights. Farther east are

*Chas. G. D. Roberts, Revisited."

"The Tantramar

HOPEWELL ROCKS Entrance to one of the caves

the sites of Fort Beausejour and Fort Lawrence; and of more recent history are the ruins of the Chignecto ship railway, a project, abandoned a few years ago, by which it was hoped to carry ships overland from the Bay of Fundy to the Northumberland Strait. To these various interests the Petitcodiac adds its peculiar distinction as perhaps the most remarkable tidal river in the world.

All the world, whether or not it knows where the Bay of Fundy is, knows of its bumper tides. A shallow valley between two shores, into which are poured twice every twenty-four hours the over-running waters of the Atlantic-that is the Bay of Fundy, and that is why the Fundy tides sometimes reach a height of seventy feet; why, too, some of the shore settlements are at the water's edge at noon and at five o'clock are almost inland, with a mile of red, slippery, clam-shelly flats in front. The shore-dwellers of the Fundy live ever in the enjoyment of their ocean swell or of the beauty that shall be when the tide comes in.

Look at the map, and find the wind

ing line of the Petitcodiac. Follow its connection with the Bay of Fundy, and see how the funnel-shape of the larger water keeps narrowing to a point from Chignecto Bay to Shepody Bay, and from Shepody to the Petitcodiac; then consider what must happen when the tidal waters, with the Atlantic's force behind them, drive up through each successive stage till they reach the marsh-country at the head. What does happen is this: a wall of water is suddenly piled up, from two to ten feet in height, and this, with a rush and roar, rolls up the Petitcodiac toward Moncton. They call it The Bore. As for all else about it, worldwonder that it is, do not the guidebooks tell it?

One might safely assume that a force of water such as this would have a lively temper. Driven into a corner, hemmed in between two narrowing shores, would not the sea, a fighter, find provocation for a wrestle with its arch-enemy, the land? But a long line of flat-lying mud banks gives small fighting ground; the most that even The Bore can do against it is to get itself muddied. There is, however, one vantage point. At Hopewell Cape, some twenty-five miles from Moncton, a line of cliffs extends for two miles along the shore of the river, reaching to a height of from forty to eighty feet. Locally they are known as the Hopewell Rocks; geologically, they are a conglomerate formation and show traces of various natural cementing materials with which the district abounds.

From the mud-flats, then, the Petitcodiac tides turn-let us suppose, with relief to these challenging cliffs and wreak upon them their pent-up spite. A very graceful form of spite, however, for they have cut the two-mile stretch of rock into strange and wonderful sculptures, leaving it a seashore gallery of art. This have they done by many centuries of wearing and pounding, on their way, twice daily, up the river.

The cliffs are in most cases sharply perpendicular. Along their lower levels, where the tides have reached, they have been hewn and hollowed into columns,