and spend some hours
with the two Kavanaghs. Forthright, into the teeth of the harbor, the wind
is blowing: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou nearest the sound
therof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth." How
long the "Balaklava" may stay here is yet uncertain. So, with a good-night
to the Red-Caps and their guests, we once more bear away for the cabin of
the schooner and another night's discomfort.

As I have said before in other words, this province is nothing more than a
piece of patchwork, intersected with petty boundary lines, so that every
nation is stitched in and quilted in spots, without any harmony, or
coherence, or general design. The people of Louisburgh are a kind,
hospitable, pleasant people, tolerably well informed for the inhabitants
of so isolated a corner of the world; but a few miles further off we come
upon a totally different race: a canting, covenanting, oat-eating,
money-griping, tribe of second-hand Scotch Presbyterians: a transplanted,
degenerate, barren patch of high cheek-bones and red hair, with nothing
cleaving to them of the original stock, except covetousness and that
peculiar cutaneous eruption for which the mother country is celebrated.
But we shall soon have enough of these Scotsmen, good reader. Our present
visit is to Lighthouse Point, to look out upon the broad Atlantic, the
rocky coast, and the island battery, which a century since gave so much
trouble to our filibustering fathers of New England. As we walked towards
the lighthouse over the pebbly beach that borders the green turf, Picton
suddenly starts off and begins a series of great jumps on the turf, giving
with every grasshopper-leap a sort of interjectional "Whuh! whuh!" as
though the feat was not confined to the leg-muscles only, but included
also a necessary exercise of the lungs. And although we shouted at the
traveller, he kept on towards the lighthouse, uttering with every jump,
"Heather, heather." At last he came to, beside a group of evergreens, and
grew rational. The springy, elastic sod, the heather of old Scotland,
reproduced in new Scotland, had reminded him of reels and strathspeys,
"for," said he, "nobody can walk upon this sort of thing without feeling a
desire to dance upon it. Thunder and turf! if we only had the pipes now!"

And sure enough here was the heather; the soft, springy turf, which has
made even Scotchmen affectionate. I do not wonder at it; it answers to the
foot-s