I guess, said he, they have got that ring to grow on their horns yet, which every four year old has in our country.  We reckon hours and minutes to be dollars and cents.  They do nothing in these parts, but eat, drink, smoke, sleep, ride about, lounge at taverns, make speeches at temperance meetings, and talk about “House of Assembly.”  If a man don’t hoe his corn, and he don’t get a crop, he says it is all owing to the Bank; and if he runs into debt and is sued, why says the lawyers are a curse to the country.  They are a most idle set of folks, I tell you.  But how is it, said I, that you manage to sell such an immense number of clocks, (which certainly cannot be called necessary articles,) among a people with whom there seems to be so great a scarcity of money.

Mr. Slick paused, as if considering the propriety of answering the question, and looking me in the face, said, in a confidential tone, Why, I don’t care if I do tell you, for the market is glutted, and I shall quit this circuit.  It is done by a knowledge of soft sawder and human natur.  But here is Deacon Flint’s, said he, I have but one clock left, and I guess I will sell it to him.  At the gate of a most comfortable looking farm house stood Deacon Flint, a respectable old man, who had understood the value of time better than most of his neighbours, if one might judge from the appearance of every thing about him.  After the usual salutation, an invitation to “alight” was accepted by Mr. Slick, who said, he wished to take leave of Mrs. Flint before he left Colchester.  We had hardly entered the house, before the Clockmaker pointed to the view from the window, and, addressing himself to me, said, if I was to tell them in Connecticut, there was such a farm as this away down east here in Nova Scotia, they would’nt believe me—­why there aint such a location in all New England.  The deacon has a hundred acres of dyke—­seventy, said the deacon, only seventy.  Well, seventy; but then there is your fine deep bottom, why I could run a ramrod into it—­Interval, we call it, said the Deacon, who, though evidently pleased at this eulogium, seemed to wish the experiment of the ramrod to be tried in the right place—­well interval if you please, (though Professor Eleazer Cumstick, in his work on Ohio, calls them bottoms,) is just as good as dyke.  Then there is that water privilege, worth 3 or $4,000, twice as good as what Governor Cass paid $15,000 for.  I wonder, Deacon, you don’t put up a carding mill on it:  the same works would carry a turning lathe, a shingle machine, a circular saw, grind bark, and ——.  Too old, said the Deacon, too old for all those speculations—­old, repeated the clock-maker, not you; why you are worth half a dozen of the young men we see, now-a-days, you are young enough to have—­here he said something in a lower tone of voice, which I did not distinctly hear; but whatever it was, the Deacon was pleased, he smiled and said he did not think of such