It Is On The Whole A Splendid Display For The Sake
Of Four Sleepy Men, Banging Along In A Coach, - An Insignificant
Little Vehicle With Two Horses.
No one is up at any of the
farmhouses to see it; no one appears to take any interest in it,
except an occasional baying dog, or a rooster that has mistaken the
time of night.
By midnight we come to Tracadie, an orchard, a
farmhouse, and a stable. We are not far from the sea now, and can
see a silver mist in the north. An inlet comes lapping up by the old
house with a salty smell and a suggestion of oyster-beds. We knock
up the sleeping hostlers, change horses, and go on again, dead
sleepy, but unable to get a wink. And all the night is blazing with
beauty. We think of the criminal who was sentenced to be kept awake
till he died.
The fiddler makes another trial. Temperately remarking, "I am very
sleepy," he kneels upon the floor and rests his head on the seat.
This position for a second promises repose; but almost immediately
his head begins to pound the seat, and beat a lively rat-a-plan on
the board. The head of a wooden idol couldn't stand this treatment
more than a minute. The fiddler twisted and turned, but his head
went like a triphammer on the seat. I have never seen a devotional
attitude so deceptive, or one that produced less favorable results.
The young man rose from his knees, and meekly said,
"It's dam hard."
If the recording angel took down this observation, he doubtless made
a note of the injured tone in which it was uttered.
How slowly the night passes to one tipping and swinging along in a
slowly moving stage! But the harbinger of the day came at last.
When the fiddler rose from his knees, I saw the morning-star burst
out of the east like a great diamond, and I knew that Venus was
strong enough to pull up even the sun, from whom she is never distant
more than an eighth of the heavenly circle. The moon could not put
her out of countenance. She blazed and scintillated with a dazzling
brilliance, a throbbing splendor, that made the moon seem a pale,
sentimental invention. Steadily she mounted, in her fresh beauty,
with the confidence and vigor of new love, driving her more domestic
rival out of the sky. And this sort of thing, I suppose, goes on
frequently. These splendors burn and this panorama passes night
after night down at the end of Nova Scotia, and all for the
stage-driver, dozing along on his box, from Antigonish to the strait.
"Here you are," cries the driver, at length, when we have become
wearily indifferent to where we are. We have reached the ferry. The
dawn has not come, but it is not far off. We step out and find a
chilly morning, and the dark waters of the Gut of Canso flowing
before us lighted here and there by a patch of white mist.
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