They take down a few half-starved pigs, old
viteran geese, and long legged fowls, some ram mutton and tough beef;
and swap them for tea, sugar, and such little notions for their old
women to home; while the railroads and canals of St. John are goin'
to cut off your Gulf Shore trade to Miramichi, and along there. Flies
live in the summer and die in winter, you're jist as noisy in war as
those little critters, but you sing small in peace.
"'No, you're done for; you are up a tree, you may depend; pride must
fall. Your town is like a ballroom arter a dance. The folks there eat,
drank, and frolicked, and left an empty house; the lamps and hangings
are left, but the people are gone.'
"'Is there no remedy for this?' said he; and he looked as wild as a
Cherokee Indian. Thinks I, the handle is fitted on proper tight now.
'Well,' says I, 'when a man has a cold, he had ought to look out
pretty sharp, afore it gets seated on his lungs; if he don't, he gets
into a gallopin' consumption, and it's gone goose with him. There is
a remedy, if applied in time: make a railroad to the Minas Basin, and
you have a way for your customers to get to you, and a conveyance for
your goods to them. When I was in New York last, a cousin of mine,
Hezekiah Slick, said to me, "I do believe Sam, I shall be ruined;
I've lost all my custom; they are widening and improving the streets,
and there's so many carts and people to work in it, folks can't come
to my shop to trade; what on airth shall I do? and I'm payin' a
dreadful high rent too?" "Stop Ki," says I, "when the street is all
finished off and slicked up, they'll all come back agin, and a whole
raft more on 'em too, you'll sell twice as much as ever you did;
you'll put off a proper swad of goods next year, you may depend;" and
so he did, he made money, hand over hand.
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