In spite of the consolations of poetry, however, the night wore on slowly, and soothing sleep tried in vain to get a lodgment in the jolting wagon.One can sleep upright, but not when his head is every moment knocked against the framework of a wagon-cover.Even a jolly young Irishman of Plaster Cove, whose nature it is to sleep under whatever discouragement, is beaten by these circumstances.He wishes he had his fiddle along.We never know what men are on casual acquaintance.This rather stupid-looking fellow is a devotee of music, and knows how to coax the sweetness out of the unwilling violin.Sometimes he goes miles and miles on winter nights to draw the seductive bow for the Cape Breton dancers, and there is enthusiasm in his voice, as he relates exploits of fiddling from sunset till the dawn of day.Other information, however, the young man has not; and when this is exhausted, he becomes sleepy again, and tries a dozen ways to twist himself into a posture in which sleep will be possible.He doubles up his legs, he slides them under the seat, he sits on the wagon bottom; but the wagon swings and jolts and knocks him about.His patience under this punishment is admirable, and there is something pathetic in his restraint from profanity.
It is enough to look out upon the magnificent night; the moon is now high, and swinging clear and distant; the air has grown chilly; the stars cannot be eclipsed by the greater light, but glow with a chastened fervor.It is on the whole a splendid display for the sake of four sleepy men, banging along in a coach,--an insignificant little vehicle with two horses.No one is up at any of the farmhouses to see it; no one appears to take any interest in it, except an occasional baying dog, or a rooster that has mistaken the time of night.By midnight we come to Tracadie, 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.
The ferryman and his shaggy comrade get ready at last, and we step into the clumsy yawl, and the slowly moving oars begin to pull us upstream.The strait is here less than a mile wide; the tide is running strongly, and the water is full of swirls,--the little whirlpools of the rip-tide.The morning-star is now high in the sky;the moon, declining in the west, is more than ever like a silver shield; along the east is a faint flush of pink.In the increasing light we can see the bold shores of the strait, and the square projection of Cape Porcupine below.
On the rocks above the town of Plaster Cove, where there is a black and white sign,--Telegraph Cable,--we set ashore our companions of the night, and see them climb up to their station for retailing the necessary means of intoxication in their district, with the mournful thought that we may never behold them again.
As we drop down along the shore, there is a white sea-gull asleep on the rock, rolled up in a ball, with his head under his wing.The rock is dripping with dew, and the bird is as wet as his hard bed.
We pass within an oar's length of him, but he does not heed us, and we do not disturb his morning slumbers.For there is no such cruelty as the waking of anybody out of a morning nap.