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NOVA SCOTIA, Canada's second-smallest province, packs an impossible variety of cultures and landscapes into a mass that's half the size of Ohio.

Nova Scotia's landscapes echo every region of Canada. Mountain clefts in Cape Breton Island could pass for crannies in British Columbia. Stretches of the Tantramar Marshes are as board-flat as the prairies. The glaciated interior, spruce-swathed and peppered with lakes, closely resembles the Canadian Shield in northern Manitoba. The apple blossoms in the Annapolis Valley are as glorious as those in Niagara, and parts of Halifax could masquerade as downtown Toronto. A massive Catholic church in a tiny French village recalls Quebec. The warm salt water and long sandy beaches of Prince Edward Island are also found on the mainland side of Northumberland Strait, and the brick-red mud flats of the Bay of Fundy echo their counterparts in Newfoundland outport - and sounds like one, too, since many of its people are Newfoundlanders by origin.

As with the land, so with the people. The Micmac Indians have been here for 1 0, 000 years. The French came to the Annapolis Basin in 1605. In the 1750s, cockneys and Irish settled in Halifax and "Fareign Protestants" - chiefly Germans - in Lunenburg. By then Yankees from New England were putting down roots in Liverpool, Cape Sable Island and the Annapolis Valley. In the 1780s they were joined by thousands of "Loyalists"- many of them black - displaced by the American Revolution. Soon after, the Scots poured into northern Nova Scotia and Cape Breton, evicted from the Highlands by their Iandlords' preference for sheep. The last wave of immigrants, in the 1890s, became steelworkers and coal minersin Cape Breton. They came from Wales, the West Indies, Poland, Ukraine, and the Middle East. They're all Nova Scotians, and they're all still here, eating their own foods, worshipping in their own churches, speaking in their rich, full-flavored voices.

Infinite riches abound: Gaelic street signs in Pugwash and Mabou, French masses in Cheticamp and Point de I'Eglise, black gospel choirs in Halifax, Micmac handcrafts in Eskasoni, onion-dome churches in Sydney, sauerkraut in Lunenburg, and Yankee Puritanism in Clark's Harbour.

This is a little buried nation, compact and distinctive, with a capital city the same size as Victorian London. Before Canada was formed in 1867, Nova Scotians were prosperous shipwrights and merchants, trading with the world. Who created Cunard Lines? A Haligonian, Samuel Cunard. Those spacious days brought democracy to the British colonies, left Victorian mansions in all the salty little ports that dot the coastline, and created a uniquely Nova Scotian outlook: worldly, approachable, sturdily independent.

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