This seems like “business,” and we are inclined to try it, especially as we have no notion where St. Peter’s is.

“Does any other stage go from here to-day anywhere else?”

“Yes.  Port Hood.  Quarter of an hour.”

Everything was about to happen in fifteen minutes.  We inquire further.  St. Peter’s is on the east coast, on the road to Sydney.  Port Hood is on the west coast.  There is a stage from Port Hood to Baddeck.  It would land us there some time Sunday morning; distance, eighty miles.

Heavens! what a pleasure-trip.  To ride eighty miles more without sleep!  We should simply be delivered dead on the Bras d’Or; that is all.  Tell us, gentle driver, is there no other way?

“Well, there’s Jim Hughes, come over at midnight with a passenger from Baddeck; he’s in the hotel now; perhaps he’ll take you.”

Our hope hung on Jim Hughes.  The frowzy servant piloted us up to his sleeping-room.  “Go right in,” said she; and we went in, according to the simple custom of the country, though it was a bedroom that one would not enter except on business.  Mr. Hughes did not like to be disturbed, but he proved himself to be a man who could wake up suddenly, shake his head, and transact business,—­a sort of Napoleon, in fact.  Mr. Hughes stared at the intruders for a moment, as if he meditated an assault.

“Do you live in Baddeck?” we asked.

“No; Hogamah,—­half-way there.”

“Will you take us to Baddeck to-day?”

Mr. Hughes thought.  He had intended to sleep—­till noon.  He had then intended to go over the Judique Mountain and get a boy.  But he was disposed to accommodate.  Yes, for money—­sum named—­he would give up his plans, and start for Baddeck in an hour.  Distance, sixty miles.  Here was a man worth having; he could come to a decision before he was out of bed.  The bargain was closed.

We would have closed any bargain to escape a Sunday in the Plaster Cove hotel.  There are different sorts of hotel uncleanliness.  There is the musty old inn, where the dirt has accumulated for years, and slow neglect has wrought a picturesque sort of dilapidation, the mouldiness of time, which has something to recommend it.  But there is nothing attractive in new nastiness, in the vulgar union of smartness and filth.  A dirty modern house, just built, a house smelling of poor whiskey and vile tobacco, its white paint grimy, its floors unclean, is ever so much worse than an old inn that never pretended to be anything but a rookery.  I say nothing against the hotel at Plaster Cove.  In fact, I recommend it.  There is a kind of harmony about it that I like.  There is a harmony between the breakfast and the frowzy Gaelic cook we saw “sozzling” about in the kitchen.  There is a harmony between the appearance of the house and the appearance of the buxom young housekeeper who comes upon the scene later, her hair saturated with the fatty matter of the bear.  The traveler will experience a pleasure in paying his bill and departing.