Folks aint thought nothin of unless they live at Treemont:  its all the go.  Do you dine at Peep’s tavern every day, and then off hot loot to Treemont, and pick your teeth on the street steps there, and folks will think you dine there.  I do it often, and it saves two dollars a day.  Then he put his finger on his nose, and says he, “Mum is the word.”  Now this Province is jist like that are soup, good enough at top, but dip down and you have the riches, the coal, the iron ore, the gypsum, and what not.  As for Halifax, its well enough in itself, though no great shakes neither, a few sizeable houses, with a proper sight of small ones, like half a dozen old hens with their broods of young chickens; but the people, the strange critters, they are all asleep.  They walk in their sleep, and talk in their sleep, and what they say one day they forget the next, they say they were dreaming.  You know where Governor Campbell lives, don’t you, in a large stone house with a great wall round it, that looks like a state prison; well, near hand there is a nasty dirty horrid lookin buryin ground there—­its filled with large grave rats as big as kittens, and the springs of black water there, go through the chinks of the rocks and flow into all the wells, and fairly pyson the folks—­its a dismal place, I tell you—­I wonder the air from it don’t turn all the silver in the Gineral’s house of a brass color, (and folks say he has four cart loads of it) its so everlastin bad—­its near about as nosey as a slave ship of niggers.  Well you may go there and shake the folks to all etarnity and you wont wake em, I guess, and yet there ant much difference atween their sleep and the folks at Halifax, only they lie still there and are quiet, and don’t walk and talk in their sleep like them above ground.

Halifax reminds me of a Russian officer I once seed at Warsaw; he had lost both arms in battle:  but I guess I must tell you first why I went there, cause that will show you how we speculate.  One Sabbath day, after bell ringin, when most of the women had gone to meetin (for they were great hands for pretty sarmons, and our Unitarian ministers all preach poetry, only they leave the ryme out, it sparkles like perry,) I goes down to East India wharf to see Captain Zeek Hancock, of Nantucket, to enquire how oil was, and if it it would bear doing any thing in; when who should come along but Jabish Green.  Slick, says he, how do you do; isn’t this as pretty a day as you’ll see between this and Norfolk; it whips English weather by a long chalk; and then he looked down at my watch seals, and looked and looked as if he thought I’d stole ’em.  At last he looks up, and says he, Slick, I suppose you would’nt go to Warsaw, would you, if it was made worth your while?  Which Warsaw? says I, for I believe in my heart we have a hundred of them.  None of ourn at all, says he; Warsaw in Poland.  Well, I don’t know, says I; what do you call worth while?  Six dollars a day, expenses paid, and a bonus of one thousand