ng your carriage along,
If you keep to the left, you are sure to go right,
If you keep to the right, you go wrong."

It would be a good thing if our present senseless laws were reversed in
this matter, and a few lives saved, and a few broken limbs prevented.

When I took leave of my native country for a short sojourn in this
province, the great question then before the public was the invasion of
international law, by the British minister and a whole solar system of
British consuls. I had the pleasure of being a fellow exile on the Canada
with Mr. Crampton, Mr. Barclay, and Mr.----, Her British Majesty's
representatives, and of course felt no little interest to know the fate of
the _Foreign Legion_.

Before I left Halifax, I learned some particulars of that famous flock of
jail birds. All that we knew, at home, was that a number of recruits for
the Crimea had been picked up in the streets and alleys of Columbia, and
carried, at an enormous expense, to Halifax, there to be enrolled. And
also, that as a mere cover to this infraction of the law of Neutrality,
the men were engaged as laborers, to work upon the public improvements of
Nova Scotia. The sequel of that enterprise remained to be told. A majority
of these recruits were Irishmen--some of them not wanting in the mother
wit of the race. So when they were gathered in the great province building
at Halifax, and Sir John Gaspard le Marchant, in chapeau, feather and
sword, came down to review his levies, with great spirit and military
pomp, "Well, my men," said he, "you are here to enlist, eh, and serve Her
Majesty?" To which the spokesman of the Foreign Legion, fully
understanding the beauty of his position, replied, with a sly twinkle of
the eye, "We didn't engage to 'list at all, at all, but to wurruk on the
railroad." Upon which Sir John Gaspard, seeing that Her Majesty had been
imposed upon, politely told the legion to go to----Dante's Inferno.

Now whether the place to which the Foreign Legion was consigned by Sir
John Gaspard, possessed even less attractions than Halifax, or from
whatever reason soever, it chanced that the jolly boys, raked from our
alleys and jails, never stirred a foot out of the province; and while the
peace of the whole world was endangered by their abduction, as that of
Greece and Troy had been by the rape of Helen, they were quietly enlisting
in less warlike expeditions--in fact, engaging themselves to work upon
that great railro