oon the moon or
the stars saw him bobbing like a wild duck in the harbour. Cleaned,
braced in nerve, and all aglow, he would run back again, and be sleeping
the sleep of the just ten minutes after. When tired with literary or
political work, a game of rackets always revived him. There was not a
better player in Halifax, civilian or military. To his latest days he
urged boys to practise manly sports and exercises of all kinds.

Such a boy, fond of communing with nature, with young blood running riot
in his veins, and with wild vague ideals and passions intertwined in his
heart, inevitably took to writing {22} poetry. But though he had the
poet's heart, he had not the concentration of the great poet. All
through his life he loved to string together verses, grave and gay. Some
of his pasquinades are very clever; some of his serious verse is
mellifluous enough; but as a poet he is not even a minor bard. Yet one
of his early effusions, named _Melville Island_, written when he was
twenty, was not without influence on his future. Such was its merit that
Sir Brenton Halliburton, a very grand old gentleman indeed, went out of
his way to compliment the lad and to advise him to cultivate his powers.
The few words of praise from a man deservedly respected roused in Howe
the high resolve to make letters his career. He deluged the local
newspapers with prose and verse, much of which was accepted. In 1827,
when just twenty-three years of age, he and another lad bought the
_Weekly Chronicle_, and changed its name to the _Acadian_, with Howe as
editor-in-chief. Before the year had ended his young ambition urged him
to sell out to his partner and to buy a larger and more ambitious paper,
the _Nova Scotian_, into possession of which he entered in January 1828.
To find the purchase-money he did not hesitate to go deeply into debt.

{23}

In the same month he added to his responsibilities and his happiness by
his marriage with Catharine Susan Ann Macnab. Men's wives bulk less
largely in their biographies than in their lives. Mrs Howe's sweetness
and charm were an unfailing strength to her husband. She moderated his
extravagance, and bore cheerfully with his habit, so trying to a
housekeeper, of filling the house with his friends at all hours and at
every meal. Above all, she never nagged, or said 'I told you so.' She
believed in him and in his work, and cheered him in his hours of
depression. A man of such buoyant feelin