"It sounds fine," said the boy, smacking his lips.
"No mention is made of seasickness, nor of going to the bottom. A pity it would be to waste all that finery on the fishes—don't rub quite so hard. Let me see," and he took up the folder again. "What days does she leave? Go to-morrow to the office, Henry, and engage the most comfortable stateroom on this bit of magnificence for next Thursday."
[CHAPTER III.]
FROM BOSTON TO ACADIE.
"For this is in the land of Acadie,
The fairest place of all the earth and sea."
J. F. H.
It is always amusing to be among a crowd of people on the Lewis Wharf, in Boston, when a steamer is about to leave for the neighboring province of Nova Scotia. The provincials are so slow, so deliberate, so determined not to be hurried. The Americans are so brisk, so expeditious, so bewildering in the multitude of things they will accomplish in the briefest possible space of time. They surround the provincials, they attempt to hurry them, to infuse a little more life into their exercises of volition, to convince them that a busy wharf is not the place to weigh arguments for or against a proposed course of action, yet the provincials will not be hurried; they stop to plan, consider, deliberate, and decide, and in the end they arrive at satisfactory conclusions without one hundredth part of the worry and vexation of soul which shortens the lives of their more nervous cousins, the Americans.
At noon, on the Thursday following his decision to go to Nova Scotia, Vesper Nimmo stood on the deck of the Royal Edward, a smile on his handsome face,—a shrewd smile, that deepened and broadened whenever he looked towards the place where stood his mother, with a fluffy white shawl wrapped around her throat, and the faithful Henry for a bodyguard.