Besides The Hurried Rush Of Those Who With These
Varied Objects In View Leave The Steamer, There Are Crowds Of
Incomers in
the shape of porters, visitors, and coalheavers, and passengers for the
States, who prefer the comfort and known
Punctuality of the Royal Mail
steamers to the delay, danger, and uncertainty of the intercolonial route,
though the expense of the former is nearly double. There are the friends
of the passengers, and numbers of persons who seem particularly well
acquainted with the purser, who bring fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry,
and lobsters.
From this description it may be imagined that there is a motley and
considerable crowd; but it will scarcely be imagined that there is only
one regulation, which is, that no persons may enter or depart till the
mail-bags have been landed. The wharf is small and at night unlighted, and
the scene which ensued on our landing about eight o'clock in the evening
reminded me, not by contrast, but resemblance, of descriptions which
travellers give of the disembarkation at Alexandria. Directly that the
board was laid from the Canada to the wharf a rush both in and out took
place, in which I was separated from my relations, and should have fallen
had not a friend, used to the scene of disorder, come to my assistance.
The wharf was dirty, unlighted, and under repair, covered with heaps and
full of holes. My friend was carrying three parcels, when three or four
men made a rush at us, seized them from him, and were only compelled to
relinquish them by some sharp physical arguments. A large gateway, lighted
by one feeble oil-lamp at the head of the wharf, was then opened, and the
crowd pent up behind it came pouring down the sloping road. There was a
simultaneous rush of trucks, hand-carts, waggons, and cars, their horses
at full trot or canter, two of them rushing against the gravel-heap on
which I was standing, where they were upset. Struggling, shouting,
beating, and scuffling, the drivers all forced their way upon the wharf,
regardless of cries from the ladies and threats from the gentlemen, for
all the passengers had landed and were fighting their way to an ice-shop.
Porters were scuffling with each other for the possession of portmanteaus,
wheels were locked, and drivers were vehemently expostulating in the rich
brogue of Erin; people were jostling each other in their haste, or diving
into the dimly-lighted custom-house, and it must have been fully half an
hour before we had extricated ourselves from this chaos of mismanagement
and disorder, by scrambling over gravel-heaps and piles of timber, into
the dirty, unlighted streets of Halifax.
Dirty they were then, though the weather was very dry, for oyster-shells,
fish heads and bones, potato-skins, and cabbage-stalks littered the roads;
but dirty was a word which does not give the faintest description of the
almost impassable state in which I found them, when I waded through them
ankle-deep in mud some months afterwards.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 10 of 249
Words from 4706 to 5216
of 129941
