When Camperdown set out, another change had taken place. The wind had died away, and reluctant snowflakes were beginning to fall from dark, smoke-colored clouds that were slowly rolling in over the harbor.
The walking was slushy and disagreeable. Pedestrians in rubber footgear passed along the sidewalks, looking in the shop windows, where pots of pseudo shamrock were freely displayed, or entering stores and offices to transact business in the leisurely, unhurried fashion peculiar to the inhabitants of the city by the sea. Every Irishman wore a large tuft of green in his hat or his buttonhole, and many horses showed the nationality of their masters by proudly shaking their heads, whereon was the emerald rosette.
A crowd of boys on a street corner, rapturously engaged in watching one of their number, who was rubbing green powder on the back of the unconscious Mrs. Macartney, as she stood waiting for a horse car, attracted Dr. Camperdown’s attention.
“You rascals!” he called to them, and suppressing a smile as they scampered away, he took off his hat to the lady and drove on. Past the City Hall he went, and steep Jacob Street, once the terminus of the ancient palisade wall that enclosed the early settlement of Halifax, and beyond which it was not safe for a white man to go unless he were willing to be scalped by the ever-watchful Indians, and entered into the dingy part of the street, where traffic to and from the railroad station is loudest and noisiest.
Below him was the dockyard with its arsenals, magazines, parade ground, and houses for officials, and its few remaining trophies of the war of 1812. He looked grimly toward it; called up some of his father’s stories of the day so many years ago, that the lads of the town ran to see the “Shannon” and the “Chesapeake” coming up the harbor with their decks stained with blood; and then smiled as he reflected on the ardent diatribes against war that he had heard from Stargarde and Vivienne.
Polypharmacy deliberately drew his hoofs in and out of the snow and mud in the street, and soon had his master to the suburb of Richmond and the contraction of the harbor, where the lovely, sudden, and beautiful view of the basin burst upon him.
Calm and quiet, surrounded by bold hills and dusky forests, it lay. Drawn half-way across it, as if giant hands had begun to stretch it there, and then had ceased, growing weary of their task, was a covering of white ice; where the ice ended abruptly the water was dark and tranquil. Five miles from him, at the head of the basin, nestled the little village of Bedford; and on the west shore his eyes sought and rested on lonely Prince’s Lodge, a melancholy souvenir, with its ruined gardens and lawns, of a once gay place of sojourn of His Royal Highness, the Duke of Kent.
His survey of the basin over, Camperdown brought back his gaze to his immediate surroundings. Just across from him, by the broken piers of a former bridge over the Narrows, were ships laid up for the winter.
“Potato ships probably,” he ejaculated. “Get on, Polypharmacy; here’s a train coming.”
Polypharmacy crept on slowly, though his master had drawn him up between the railway track and a high, snowy bank with overhanging trees, up which he would find it impossible to go, no matter how frightened he would be. But Polypharmacy did not mind a train. When it came shrieking around the curve beside him, he merely flicked the ear next it in temporary annoyance, and proceeded philosophically on his way.