A wild drive we had from this place to Pictou. The road lay through
forests which might have been sown at the beginning of time. Huge hemlocks
threw high their giant arms, and from between their dark stems gleamed the
bark of the silver birch. Elm, beech, and maple flourished; I missed alone
the oak of England.
The solemn silence of these pathless roads was broken only by the note of
the distant bull-frog; meteors fell in streams of fire, the crescent moon
occasionally gleamed behind clouds from which the lightning flashed almost
continually, and the absence of any familiar faces made me realize at
length that I was a stranger in a strange land.
After the subject of the colony had been exhausted, I amused the coachman
with anecdotes of the supernatural - stories of ghosts, wraiths,
apparitions, and second sight; but he professed himself a disbeliever, and
I thought I had failed to make any impression on him, till at last he
started at the crackling of a twig, and the gleaming whiteness of a silver
birch. He would have liked the stories better, he confessed at length, if
the night had not been quite so dark.
