Fightin is no way to make converts; the true way is to Win ’em.  You may stop a man’s mouth, Sam, says he, by a crammin a book down his throat, but you won’t convince him.  Its a fine thing to write a book all covered over with Latin, and Greek, and Hebrew, like a bridle that’s real jam, all spangled with brass nails, but who knows whether its right or wrong? why not one in ten thousand.  If I had my religion to choose, and warn’t able to judge for myself I’ll tell you what I’d do:  I’d just ask myself who leads the best lives?  Now, says he, Sam, I won’t say who do, because it would look like vanity to say it was the folks who hold to our platform, but I’ll tell you who don’t.  It aint them that makes the greatest professions always; and mind what I tell you, Sam, when you go a tradin with your clocks away down east to Nova-Scotia, and them wild provinces, keep a bright look out on them as cant too much, for A long face is plaguy apt to cover A long conscience—­that’s a fact.

No.  XXV

Taming a Shrew.

The road from Amherst to Parrsboro’ is tedious and uninteresting.  In places it is made so straight, that you can see several miles of it before you, which produces an appearance of interminable length, while the stunted growth of the spruce and birch trees bespeaks a cold thin soil, and invests the scene with a melancholy and sterile aspect.  Here and there occurs a little valley with its meandering stream, and verdant and fertile intervale, which, though possessing nothing peculiar to distinguish it from many others of the same kind, strikes the traveller as superior to them all, from the contrast to the surrounding country.  One of these secluded spots attracted my attention, from the number and neatness of the buildings, which its proprietor, a tanner and currier, had erected for the purposes of his trade.  Mr. Slick said be knew him, and he guessed it was a pity he couldn’t keep his wife in as good order as he did his factory.  They don’t hitch their horses together well at all.  He is properly hen-pecked, said he; he is afeerd to call his soul his own, and he leads the life of a dog; you never seed the beat of it, I vow.  Did you ever see a rooster hatch a brood of chickens?  No, said I, not that I can recollect.  Well then I have, said he, and if he don’t look like a fool all the time he is a settin on the eggs, its a pity; no soul could help larfin to see him.  Our old nigger, January Snow, had a spite agin one of father’s roosters, seein that he was a coward, and would’nt fight.  He used to call him Dearborne, arter our General that behaved so ugly to Canada; and, says he one day, I guess you are no better than a hen, you everlastin old chicken-hearted villain, and I’ll make you a larfin stock to