But If Any One Wants To Know What Sort Of A
Place St. John Is, We Can Tell Him:
It is the sort of a place that if
you get into it after eight o'clock on Wednesday morning, you cannot
get out of it in any direction until Thursday morning at eight
o'clock, unless you want to smuggle goods on the night train to
Bangor.
It was eleven o'clock Wednesday forenoon when we arrived at
St. John. The Intercolonial railway train had gone to Shediac; it
had gone also on its roundabout Moncton, Missaquat River, Truro,
Stewiack, and Shubenacadie way to Halifax; the boat had gone to Digby
Gut and Annapolis to catch the train that way for Halifax; the boat
had gone up the river to Frederick, the capital. We could go to none
of these places till the next day. We had no desire to go to
Frederick, but we made the fact that we were cut off from it an
addition to our injury. The people of St. John have this
peculiarity: they never start to go anywhere except early in the
morning.
The reader to whom time is nothing does not yet appreciate the
annoyance of our situation. Our time was strictly limited. The
active world is so constituted that it could not spare us more than
two weeks. We must reach Baddeck Saturday night or never. To go
home without seeing Baddeck was simply intolerable. Had we not told
everybody that we were going to Baddeck? Now, if we had gone to
Shediac in the train that left St. John that morning, we should have
taken the steamboat that would have carried us to Port Hawkesbury,
whence a stage connected with a steamboat on the Bras d'Or, which
(with all this profusion of relative pronouns) would land us at
Baddeck on Friday. How many times had we been over this route on the
map and the prospectus of travel! And now, what a delusion it
seemed! There would not another boat leave Shediac on this route
till the following Tuesday, - quite too late for our purpose. The
reader sees where we were, and will be prepared, if he has a map (and
any feelings), to appreciate the masterly strategy that followed.
II
During the pilgrimage everything does not suit the tastes of the
pilgrim. - TURKISH PROVERB.
One seeking Baddeck, as a possession, would not like to be detained a
prisoner even in Eden, - much less in St. John, which is unlike Eden
in several important respects. The tree of knowledge does not grow
there, for one thing; at least St. John's ignorance of Baddeck
amounts to a feature. This encountered us everywhere. So dense was
this ignorance, that we, whose only knowledge of the desired place
was obtained from the prospectus of travel, came to regard ourselves
as missionaries of geographical information in this dark provincial
city.
The clerk at the Victoria was not unwilling to help us on our
journey, but if he could have had his way, we would have gone to a
place on Prince Edward Island which used to be called Bedeque, but is
now named Summerside, in the hope of attracting summer visitors.
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