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
t