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.
We took apartments for two days at the Waverley House, a most comfortless
place, yet the best inn at Halifax. Three hours after we landed, the
Canada fired her guns, and steamed off to Boston; and as I saw her
coloured lights disappear round the heads of the harbour, I did not feel
the slightest regret at having taken leave of her for ever. We remained
for two days at Halifax, and saw the little which was worth seeing in the
Nova-Scotian capital.
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