Thus, On Their Arrival
At The Bend, The Delinquents Found That, Besides Being Both Censured And
Laughed At For Their Selfishness, They Had Lost Their Places, Their
Dinners, And Their Tempers.
As we were rowing to shore, the captain told us that our worst difficulty
was yet to come - an insuperable one, he added, to corpulent persons.
There
was no landing-place for boats, or indeed for anything, at low water, and
we had to climb up a wharf ten feet high, formed of huge round logs placed
a foot apart from each other, and slippery with sea-grass. It is really
incredible that, at a place through which a considerable traffic passes,
as being on the high road from Prince Edward Island to the United States,
there should be a more inconvenient landing-place than I ever saw at a
Highland village.
Large, high, springless waggons were waiting for us on this wharf, which,
after jolting us along a bad road for some distance, deposited us at the
door of the inn at Shediac, where we came for the first time upon the
track of the cholera, which had recently devastated all the places along
our route. Here we had a substantial dinner of a very homely description,
and, as in Nova Scotia, a cup of tea sweetened with molasses was placed by
each plate, instead of any intoxicating beverage.
After this meal I went into the "house-room," or parlour, a general
"rendezvous" of lady visitors, babies, unmannerly children, Irish servant-
girls with tangled hair and bare feet, colonial gossips, "cute" urchins,
and not unfrequently of those curious-looking beings, pauper-emigrant lads
from Erin, who do a little of everything and nothing well, denominated
stable-helps.
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