Sometimes We Traversed Swamps Swarming With Bullfrogs, On Corduroy Roads Which Nearly Jolted Us Out Of The Vehicle, Then Dreary Levels Abounding In Spindly Hacmetac, Hemlock, And Birch-Trees; Next We Would Go Down Into A Cedar-Swamp Alive With Mosquitoes.

Dense forests, impassable morasses, and sedgy streams always bounded the immediate prospect, and the clearings were few and far between.

Nor was the conversation of my companions calculated to beguile a tedious journey; it was on "snatching," "snarlings" and other puerilities of island politics, corn, sugar, and molasses.

About dusk we reached the Bend, a dismal piece of alluvial swampy-looking land, drained by a wide, muddy river, called the Petticodiac, along the shore of which a considerable shipbuilding village is located. The tide here rises and falls twenty-four feet, and sixty at the mouth of the river, in the Bay of Fundy. It was a dispiriting view - acres of mud bare at low water, and miles of swamp covered with rank coarse grass, intersected by tide-streams, which are continually crossed on rotten wooden bridges without parapets. This place had recently been haunted by fever and cholera.

As there was a slight incline into the village, our miserable ponies commenced a shambling trot, the noise of which brought numerous idlers to the inn-door to inquire the news. This inn was a rambling, unpainted erection of wood, opposite to a "cash, credit, and barter store," kept by an enterprising Caledonian - an additional proof of the saying which ascribes ubiquity to "Scots, Newcastle grindstones, and Birmingham buttons." A tidy, bustling landlady, very American in her phraseology, but kind in her way, took me under her especial protection, as forty men were staying in the house, and there was an astonishing paucity of the softer sex; indeed, in all my subsequent travels I met with an undue and rather disagreeable preponderance of the "lords of the creation."

Not being inclined to sit in the "parlour" with a very motley company, I accompanied the hostess into the kitchen, and sat by the fire upon a chopping-block, the most luxurious seat in the apartment. Two shoeless Irish girls were my other companions, and one of them, hearing that I was from England, inquired if I were acquainted with "one Mike Donovan, of Skibbereen!" The landlady's daughter was also there, a little, sharp- visaged, precocious torment of three years old, who spilt my ink and lost my thimble; and then, coming up to me, said, "Well, stranger, I guess you're kinder tired." She very unceremoniously detached my watch from my chain, and, looking at it quite with the eye of a connoisseur, "guessed it must have cost a pretty high figure"! After she had filled my purse with ink, for which misdemeanour her mother offered no apology, I looked into the tea-room, which presented the curious spectacle of forty men, including a number of ship-carpenters of highly respectable appearance, taking tea in the silent, business-like way in which Transatlantic meals are generally despatched.

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