Nature and Human Nature

by Thomas Chandler Haliburton

Mother, when I was a boy, used to coax me up so everlastingly with loaf-cake, I declare I got such a sweet tooth, I could hardly eat plain bread made of flour and corn meal, although it was the wholesomest of the two. When I used to tell Minister this sometimes, as he was flying off the handle, like when we travelled through New York State to Niagara, at the scenery of the Hudson; or Lake George, or that everlastin’ water-fall, he’d say—

“Sam, you are as correct as a problem in Euclid, but as cold and dry. Business and romance are like oil and water that I use for a night-lamp, with a little cork dipsey. They oughtn’t to be mixed, but each to be separate, or they spoil each other. The tumbler should be nearly full of water, then pour a little oil on the top, and put in your tiny wick and floater, and ignite it. The water goes to the bottom—that’s business you see, solid and heavy. The oil and its burner lies on the top—and that’s romance. It’s a living flame, not enough to illuminate the room, but to cheer you through the night, and if you want more, it will light stronger ones for you. People have a wrong idea of romance, Sam. Properly understood, it’s a right keen, lively appreciation of the works of nature, and its beauty, wonders, and sublimity. From thence we learn to fear, to serve, and to adore Him that made them and us. Now, Sam, you understand all the wheels, and pullies, and balances of your wooden clocks; but you don’t think anything more of them, than it’s a grand speculation for you, because they cost you a mere nothing, seeing they are made out of that which is as cheap as dirt here, and because you make a great profit out of them among the benighted colonists, who know little themselves, and are governed by English officials who know still less. Well, that’s nateral, for it is a business view of things.¹ Now sposen you lived in the Far West woods, away from great cities, and never saw a watch or a wooden clock before, and fust sot your eyes on one of them that was as true as the sun, wouldn’t you break out into enthusiasm about it, and then extol to the skies the skill and knowledge of the Yankee man that invented and made it? To be sure you would. Wouldn’t it carry you off into contemplatin’ of the planet whose daily course and speed it measures so exact? Wouldn’t you go on from that point, and ask yourself what must be the wisdom and power of Him who made innumerable worlds, and caused them to form part of a great, grand, magnificent, and harmonious system, and fly off the handle, as you call it, in admiration and awe? To be sure you would. And if anybody said you was full of romance who heard you, wouldn’t you have pitied his ignorance, and said there are other enjoyments we are capable of besides corporeal ones? Wouldn’t you be a wiser and a better man? Don’t you go now for to run down romance, Sam; if you do, I shall think you don’t know there is a divinity within you,” and so he would preach on for an hour, till I thought it was time for him to say Amen and give the dismissal benediction.

¹ It is manifest Mr Hopewell must have had Paley’s illustration in his mind.

Well, that’s the way I came by it, I was inoculated for it, but I was always a hard subject to inoculate. Vaccination was tried on me over and over again by the doctor before I took it, but at last it came and got into the system. So it was with him and his romance, it was only the continual dropping that wore the stone at last, for I didn’t listen as I had ought to have done. If he had a showed me where I could have made a dollar, he would have found me wide awake, I know, for I set out in life with a determination to go ahead, and I have; and now I am well to do, but still I wish I had a minded more what he did say, for, poor old soul, he is dead now. An opportunity lost, is like missing a passage, another chance may never offer to make the voyage worth while. The first wind may carry you to the end. A good start often wins the race. To miss your chance of a shot, is to lose the bird.

How true these “saws” of his are; but I don’t recollect half of them, I am ashamed to say. Yes, it took me a long time to get romance in my sails, and Peter shook it out of them by one shiver in the wind. So we went to work. The moose was left on the shore, for the doctor said he had another destination for him than the water-fall. Betty, Jackson, and Peter, were embarked with their baskets and utensils in the boats, and directed to prepare our dinner.

As soon as they were fairly off, we strolled leisurely back to the house, which I had hardly time to examine before. It was an irregular building made of hewn logs, and appeared to have been enlarged, from time to time, as more accommodation had been required. There was neither uniformity nor design in it, and it might rather be called a small cluster of little tenements than a house. Two of these structures alone seemed to correspond in appearance and size. They protruded in front, from each end of the main building, forming with it three sides of a square. One of these was appropriated to the purposes of a museum, and the other used as a workshop. The former contained an exceedingly interesting collection.

“This room,” he said, “I cannot intrust to Jackson, who would soon throw everything into confusion by grouping instead of classifying things. This country is full of most valuable minerals, and the people know as much about them as a pudding does of the plums contained in it. Observe this shelf, Sir, there are specimens of seven different kinds of copper on it; and on this one, fragments of four kinds of lead. In the argentiferous galena is a very considerable proportion of silver. Here is a piece of a mineral called molybdena of singular beauty, I found it at Gaberous Bay, in Cape Breton. The iron ores you see are of great variety. The coal-fields of this colony are immense in extent, and incalculable in value. All this case is filled with their several varieties. These precious stones are from the Bay of Fundy. Among them are amethyst, and other varieties of crystal, of quartz, henlandite, stibite, analcine, chabasie, albite, nesotype, silicious sinter, and so on. Pray do me the favour to accept this amethyst. I have several others of equal size and beauty, and it is of no use to me.”

He also presented Cutler with a splendid piece of nesotype or needle stone, which he begged him to keep as a memento of the “Bachelor Beaver’s-dam.”

“Three things, Mr Slick,” he continued, “are necessary to the development of the mineral wealth of this province—skill, capital, and population; and depend upon it the day is not far distant, when this magnificent colony will support the largest population, for its area, in America.”

I am not a mineralogist myself, Squire, and much of what he said was heathen Greek to me, but some general things I could understand, and remember such as that there are (to say nothing of smaller ones) four immense independent coal-fields in the eastern section of Nova Scotia; namely, at Picton, Pomquet, Cumberland, and Londonderry; the first of which covers an area of one hundred square miles: and that there are also at Cape Breton two other enormous fields of the same mineral, one covering one hundred and twenty square miles, and presenting at Lingan a vein eleven feet thick. Such facts I could comprehend, and I was sorry when I heard the bugle announcing that the boat had returned for us.