On a beautiful, sunny, warm July mid-morning in 1892, a well dressed young man stepped down from the mail horse drawn carriage in front of a little store, which also housed the Post Office at Church Point, in Nova Scotia.”

“Jean Jacques Stehelin had just passed his twenty-first birthday, as he stood there in a very strange country, among people so different from his own countrymen, a difference more pronounced because they were supposed to be french-speaking and he hardly understood what they said. This was a new world indeed and perhaps he had not prepared himself for something so different.”

“For a moment, his mind flew back home, his father’s large house with its manicured lawns, the multi-coloured flower beds and the family “atelage”, waiting at the carriage entrance.

He remembered his own Arabian thoroughbred saddle horse, Bombe, bob-tailed as was the style then, immaculately turned out every morning, ready for perhaps a day’s hunting party, the exhilarating chase of the fox, to the voices of the hounds and the calls of the horn or perhaps just a canter to visit friends.

But he had tired of all that, as later on he had also tired of the gay and debonair life of the Paris salons, the music halls and the grand balls. .. Anyway, it was time he found a niche in the world for himself. Unfortunately too, the call up for his year’s military service was approaching and he did not relish the prospect of life as a recruit at the lowly of “simple soldat”. And so, after long soul searching sessions with his father, it had been decided that he would tempt his luck in America, more specifically in Nova Scotia, by all accounts a fabulous country.” (p.13)