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To-day our city is alive with bustling throngs of busy people. Bands of music and craftsmen of many kinds parade the streets. Flags and banners are everywhere displayed. In our harbor two great nations are represented, their vessels float side by side and interchange pleasant courtesies. The hills that one hundred years ago were covered by stunted spruce, the swamps that were home of the wild bird, are to-day, covered with houses and laid out in streets wherein an active people vigorously pursue, their varied avocations. And, above all, in the great buildings at the lower end of the city, are collected from all parts of the land the products with which skill and industry and ingenuity and genius have enriched the age. There is something in all this to quicken the pulse, to thrill the heart, to send the life blood fast throbbing through the veins. It is a vast change in one hundred years. The men who founded our city may have had one leading idea. Those who live here to-day have many, and are keenly alive to the spirit of the age and to the influences that surround them. The old Loyalists, could they survey our streets to-day, would not recognize them. In the brightest dreams of the most sanguine of them could scarcely ever have hoped to witness so much of life and activity. But, if they could form only inadequate conceptions of what the material future might be, how difficult it would be for them to realize that all recollection of the bitter strife from which they suffered so severely would, in less than a century pass away; that in this harbor, side by side, the war vessels of England and America would meet only to give each other harmonious greeting, and to rejoice together that all recollection of the unpleasant past was forever forgotten.
OUR CENTENNIAL.
At the anniversary of the surrender of Yorktown, after the American flag had been honored and at the close of the national rejoicing over the Centennial of that great event, the American officer in charge hoisted the British flag and saluted it with one hundred guns. Mr. J. W. Lawrence, President of the New Brunswick Historical Society, has been strongly impressed with the idea that that salute could be properly returned at the celebration of our city’s Centennial, a city founded by those men who left the United States because of the, to them, disastrous surrender of Cornwallis. He had the matter brought under the attention of the Marquis of Lorne, and yesterday saw his wishes consummated. H. M. S. “Garnet” was sent here to answer the salute. After the opening yesterday was over she ran the American flag to the masthead and gave it the national salute of twenty-one guns. The U. S. warship “Alliance,” which was beautifully decorated with flags, promptly responded. The incident is a remarkably interesting one, and gave the St. John people great satisfaction.