'Now,' says the Major, 'I'll give you, Slick, a new wrinkle on your
horn. Folks ain't thought nothin' of unless they live at Treemont:
it's all the go. Do you dine at Peep's tavern every day, and then off
hot foot to Treemont, and pick your teeth on the street steps there,
and folks will think you dine there. I do it often, and it saves two
dollars a day.' Then he put his finger on his nose, and says he, 'Mum
is the word.'
"Now, this Province is jist like that 'ere soup--good enough at top,
but dip down and you have the riches, the coal, the iron ore, the
gypsum, and what not. As for Halifax, it's well enough in itself,
though no great shakes neither, a few sizeable houses, with a proper
sight of small ones, like half a dozen old hens with their broods of
young chickens; but the people, the strange critters, they are all
asleep. They walk in their sleep, and talk in their sleep, and what
they say one day they forget the next; they say they were dreaming.
You know where Governor Campbell lives, don't you, in a large stone
house with a great wall round it, that looks like a state prison;
well, near hand there is a nasty dirty horrid-lookin' buryin' ground
there; it's filled with large grave rats as big as kittens, and the
springs of black water there go through the chinks of the rocks and
flow into all the wells, and fairly pyson the folks; it's a dismal
place, I tell you; I wonder the air from it don't turn all the silver
in the Governor's house of a brass colour--and folks say he has four
cart loads of it--it's so everlastin' bad; it's near about as nosey
as a slave ship of niggers.
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