sell the pews; and, I tell you it pays well and makes a real good investment.  There were few better specs among us than Inns and Churches, until the Railroads came on the carpet—­as soon as the novelty of the new preacher wears off, we hire another, and that keeps up the steam.  I trust it will be long, very long, my friend, said I, ere the rage for speculation introduces “the money changers into the temple,” with us.  Mr. Slick looked at me with a most ineffable expression of pity and surprise.  Depend on it, Sir, said he, with a most philosophical air, this Province is much behind the intelligence of the age.  But if it is behind us in that respect, it is a long chalk ahead on us in others.

I never seed or heard tell of a country that had so many natural privileges as this.  Why there are twice as many harbors and water powers were, as we have all the way from Eastport to New OrLEENS.  They have all they can ax, and more than they desarve.  They have iron, coal, slate, grindstone, lime, firestone, gypsum, freestone, and a list as long as an auctioneer’s catalogue.  But they are either asleep, or stone blind to them.  Their shores are crowded with fish, and their lands covered with wood.  A government that lays as light on ’em as a down counterpin, and no taxes.  Then look at their dykes.  The Lord seems to have made ’em on purpose for such lazy folks.  If you were to tell the citizens of our country, that these dykes had been cropped for a hundred years without manure, they’d say, they guessed you had seen Col.  Crookett, the greatest hand at a flam in our nation.  You have heerd tell of a man who could’nt see London for the houses, I tell you, if we had this country, you could’nt see the harbors for the shipping.  There’d be a rush of folks to it, as there is in one of our inns, to the dinner table, when they sometimes get jammed together in the door-way, and a man has to take a running leap over their heads, afore he can get in.  A little nigger boy in New York found a diamond worth 2,000 dollars; well, he sold it to a watchmaker for 50 cents—­the little critter did’nt know no better.  Your people are just like the nigger boy, they don’t know the value of their diamond.

Do you know the reason monkeys are no good? because they chatter all day long—­so do the niggers—­and so do the Blue Noses of Nova Scotia—­its all talk and no work; now, with us its all work and no talk—­in our ship yards, our factories, our mills, and even in our Vessels, there’s no talk—­a man can’t work and talk too.  I guess if you were at the factories at Lowell we’d show you a wonder —­five hundred galls at work together, all in silence.  I don’t think our great country has such a real natural curiosity as that—­I expect the world don’t contain the beat of that; for a woman’s tongue goes so slick of itself, without water power or steam, and moves so easy on its hinges, that its no easy matter to put a spring stop on it, I tell you—­it comes as natural as drinkin mint julip.