an orchard, a farmhouse, and a stable.  We are not far from the sea now, and can see a silver mist in the north.  An inlet comes lapping up by the old house with a salty smell and a suggestion of oyster-beds.  We knock up the sleeping hostlers, change horses, and go on again, dead sleepy, but unable to get a wink.  And all the night is blazing with beauty.  We think of the criminal who was sentenced to be kept awake till he died.

The fiddler makes another trial.  Temperately remarking, “I am very sleepy,” he kneels upon the floor and rests his head on the seat.  This position for a second promises repose; but almost immediately his head begins to pound the seat, and beat a lively rat-a-plan on the board.  The head of a wooden idol couldn’t stand this treatment more than a minute.  The fiddler twisted and turned, but his head went like a triphammer on the seat.  I have never seen a devotional attitude so deceptive, or one that produced less favorable results.  The young man rose from his knees, and meekly said,

“It’s dam hard.”

If the recording angel took down this observation, he doubtless made a note of the injured tone in which it was uttered.

How slowly the night passes to one tipping and swinging along in a slowly moving stage!  But the harbinger of the day came at last.  When the fiddler rose from his knees, I saw the morning-star burst out of the east like a great diamond, and I knew that Venus was strong enough to pull up even the sun, from whom she is never distant more than an eighth of the heavenly circle.  The moon could not put her out of countenance.  She blazed and scintillated with a dazzling brilliance, a throbbing splendor, that made the moon seem a pale, sentimental invention.  Steadily she mounted, in her fresh beauty, with the confidence and vigor of new love, driving her more domestic rival out of the sky.  And this sort of thing, I suppose, goes on frequently.  These splendors burn and this panorama passes night after night down at the end of Nova Scotia, and all for the stage-driver, dozing along on his box, from Antigonish to the strait.

“Here you are,” cries the driver, at length, when we have become wearily indifferent to where we are.  We have reached the ferry.  The dawn has not come, but it is not far off.  We step out and find a chilly morning, and the dark waters of the Gut of Canso flowing before us lighted here and there by a patch of white mist.  The ferryman is asleep, and his door is shut.  We call him by all the names known among men.  We pound upon his house, but he makes no sign.  Before he awakes and comes out, growling, the sky in the east is lightened a shade, and the star of the dawn sparkles less brilliantly.  But the process is slow.  The twilight is long.  There is a surprising deliberation about the preparation of the sun for rising, as there is in the movements of the boatman.  Both appear to be reluctant to begin the day.