calm, said he, it would pyson the univarse; no soul could breathe the air, it would be so uncommon bad.  Stagnant water is always unpleasant, bat salt water when it gets tainted beats all natur; motion keeps it sweet and wholesome, and that our minister used to say is one of the ‘wonders of the great deep.’  This province is stagnant; it tante deep like still water neither, for its shaller enough, gracious knows, but it is motionless, noiseless, lifeless.  If you have ever been to sea, in a calm, you’d know what a plaguy tiresome thing it is for a man that’s in a hurry.  An everlastin flappin of the sails, and a creakin of the boombs, and an onsteady pitchin of the ship, and folks lyin about dozin away their time, and the sea a heavin a long heavy swell, like the breathin of the chist of some great monster asleep.  A passenger wonders the sailors are so plagy easy about it, and he goes a lookin out east, and a spyin out west, to see if there’s any chance of a breeze, and says to himself ’Well, if this aint dull music its a pity.’  Then how streaked he feels when he sees a steamboat a clippin it by him like mad, and the folks on board pokin fun at him, and askin him if he has any word to send to home.  Well, he says, if any soul ever catches me on board a sail vessel again, when I can go by steam, I’ll give him leave to tell me of it, that’s a fact.  That’s partly the case here.  They are becalmed, and they see us going a head on them, till we are een amost out of sight; yet they hant got a steamboat, and they hant got a rail road; indeed, I doubt if one half on em ever see’d or heerd tell of one or tother of them.  I never see’d any folks like ’em except the Indians, and they wont even so much as look—­they hav’nt the least morsel of curiosity in the world; from which one of our Unitarian preachers (they are dreadful hands at DOUBTIN them.  I don’t doubt but some day or another, they will doubt whether every thing aint a doubt) in a very learned work, doubts whether they were ever descended from Eve at all.  Old marm Eve’s children, he says, are all lost, it is said, in consequence of too much curiosity, while these copper colored folks are lost from havin too little little.  How can they be the same?  Thinks I, that may be logic, old Dubersome, but it ant sense, don’t extremes meet?  Now these Blue Noses have no motion in ’em, no enterprise, no spirit, and if any critter shows any symptoms of activity, they say he is a man of no judgment, he’s speculative, he’s a schemer, in short he’s mad.  They vegitate like a lettuce plant in sarse garden, they grow tall and, spindlin, run to seed right off, grow as bitter as gaul and die.