"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 would, for poor Cuffee's sake, that much-vaunted British sympathy and British philanthropy had something better to show to an admiring world than the prospect around Deer's Castle."
Notwithstanding the very generous banquet spread before the eyes of the traveller, on the sign-board, we were compelled to dismiss the pleasant fiction of the poet upon the announcement of Mrs. Deer, that "Nathin was in de house 'cept bacon," and she "reckoned" she "might have an egg or two by de time we got back from Chizzincook."
"But you have plenty of trout here in these streams?"
"Oh! yes, plenty, sah."