While we were at supper the steamboat arrived from Pictou.  We hastened on board, impatient for progress on our homeward journey.  But haste was not called for.  The steamboat would not sail on her return till morning.  No one could tell why.  It was not on account of freight to take in or discharge; it was not in hope of more passengers, for they were all on board.  But if the boat had returned that night to Pictou, some of the passengers might have left her and gone west by rail, instead of wasting two, or three days lounging through Northumberland Sound and idling in the harbors of Prince Edward Island.  If the steamboat would leave at midnight, we could catch the railway train at Pictou.  Probably the officials were aware of this, and they preferred to have our company to Shediac.  We mention this so that the tourist who comes this way may learn to possess his soul in patience, and know that steamboats are not run for his accommodation, but to give him repose and to familiarize him with the country.  It is almost impossible to give the unscientific reader an idea of the slowness of travel by steamboat in these regions.  Let him first fix his mind on the fact that the earth moves through space at a speed of more than sixty-six thousand miles an hour.  This is a speed eleven hundred times greater than that of the most rapid express trains.  If the distance traversed by a locomotive in an hour is represented by one tenth of an inch, it would need a line nine feet long to indicate the corresponding advance of the earth in the same time.  But a tortoise, pursuing his ordinary gait without a wager, moves eleven hundred times slower than an express train.  We have here a basis of comparison with the provincial steamboats.  If we had seen a tortoise start that night from Port Hawkesbury for the west, we should have desired to send letters by him.

In the early morning we stole out of the romantic strait, and by breakfast-time we were over St. George’s Bay and round his cape, and making for the harbor of Pictou.  During the forenoon something in the nature of an excursion developed itself on the steamboat, but it had so few of the bustling features of an American excursion that I thought it might be a pilgrimage.  Yet it doubtless was a highly developed provincial lark.  For a certain portion of the passengers had the unmistakable excursion air:  the half-jocular manner towards each other, the local facetiousness which is so offensive to uninterested fellow-travelers, that male obsequiousness about ladies’ shawls and reticules, the clumsy pretense of gallantry with each other’s wives, the anxiety about the company luggage and the company health.  It became painfully evident presently that it was an excursion, for we heard singing of that concerted and determined kind that depresses the spirits of all except those who join in it.  The excursion had assembled on the lee guards out of the wind, and was enjoying itself in an abandon of serious musical enthusiasm.  We