u need not fear
But you will be well treated by WILLIAM DEER,
And by Mrs. DEER, his dearest, deary dear!"

I quote from memory. The precise words have escaped me, but the above is
the substance of the sense, and the metre is accurate.

It was a little, weather-beaten shanty of boards, that clung like flakes
to the frame-work. A show-box of a room, papered with select wood-cuts
from _Punch_ and the _Illustrated London News_, was the grand banquet-hall
of the castle. And indeed it was a castle compared with the wretched
redoubts of poverty around it. Here we changed horses, or rather we
exchanged our horse, for a diminutive, bantam pony, that, under the
supervision of "Bill," was put inside the shafts and buckled up to the
very roots of the harness. This Bill, the son and heir of the Castellen,
was a good-natured yellow boy, about fifteen years of age, with such a
development of under-lip and such a want of development elsewhere, that
his head looked like a scoop. There was an infinite fund of humor in
Billy, an uncontrollable sense of the comic, that would break out in spite
of his grave endeavors to put himself under guard. It exhibited itself in
his motions and gestures, in the flourish of his hands as he buckled up
the pony, in the looseness of his gait, the swing of his head, and the
roll of his eyes. His very language was pregnant with mirth; thus:

"Bill!"

"Cheh, cheh, sir? cheh."

"Is your father at home?"

"Cheh, cheh, father? cheh, cheh."

"Yes, your father?"

"Cheh, cheh, at home, sah? cheh."

"Yes, is your father at home?"

"I guess so, cheh, cheh."

"What is the matter with you, Bill? what are you laughing about?"

"Cheh, cheh, I don't know, sah, cheh, cheh."

"Well, take out the horse, and put in the pony; we want to go to
Chizzencook."

"Cheh, Cheh'z'ncook? Yes, sah," and so with that facetious gait and droll
twist of the elbow, Bill swings himself against the horse and unbuckles
him in a perpetual jingle of merriment.

"And this," said I to my companion, as we looked from the door-step of the
shanty upon the spiry tops of evergreens in the valley below us, and at
the wretched log-huts that were roosting up on the bare rocks around us,
"this is the negro settlement?"

"Yes," he replied.

"Are all the negro settlements in Nova Scotia as miserable, as this?"

"Yes," he answered; "you can tell a negro settlement at once by its
appearance."

"Then," I thought to myself, "I wou