CHAPTER XIV.
Halifax again—Hotel Waverley—"Gone the Old Familiar Faces"—The Story of Marie de la Tour.
Again in old quarters! It is strange how we become attached to a place, be it what it may, if we only have known it before. The same old room we occupied years ago, however comfortless then, has a familiar air of welcome now. There is surely some little trace of self, some unseen spider-thread of attachment clinging to the walls, the old chair, the forlorn wash-stand, and the knobby four-poster, that holds the hardest of beds, the most consumptive of pillows, and a bolster as round, as white, and as hard, as a cathedral mass-candle. Heigho, Hotel Waverley! Here am I again; but where are the familiar faces? Where the brave soldier of Inkerman and Balaklava? Where the jolly old Captain of the native rifles? Where the Colonel, with his little meerschaum pipe he was so intent upon coloring? Where the party of salmon-fishermen, the Solomons of piscatology? Where the passengers by the "Canada?" And where is Picton? Gone, like last year's birds!
"A glass of ale, Henry, and one cigar, only one; I wish to be solitary."
I like this bed-room of mine at the Waverley, with its blue and white striped curtain at the window, through which the gas-lights of Halifax streets appear in lucid spots, as I wait for Henry, with the candles. Now I am no longer alone. I shut my chamber door, as it were, upon one world, only that I may enjoy another. So I trim the candles, and spread out the writing materials, and at once the characters of two centuries ago awake, and their life to me is as the life of to-day.
There is nothing more captivating in literature, than the narrative of some heroic deed of woman. Very few such are recorded; how many might be, if the actors themselves had not shunned notoriety, and "uncommended died," rather than encounter the ordeal of public praise? Of such the poet has written:
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air."
Of such, many have lived and died, to live again only in fiction; whereas their own true histories would have been greater than the inventions of authors. We read of heroes laden with the "glittering spoils of empire," but the heroic deeds of woman are oftentimes, all in all, as great, without the glitter; without the pomp and pageantry of triumphal processions; without the pealing trumpet of renown. Boadicea, chained to the car of Suetonius, is the too common memorial of heroic womanity.
The story I relate is but a transcript, a mere episode in the sad history of Acadia: yet the record will be pleasing to those who estimate the merits of brave women. This, then, is the legend of