Brought in the olden time from France, and since, as an heir-loom,Handed down from mother to child, through long generations."
Alas! the ear-rings are worn out with age! but save them, the picture is very true to the life. As we salute the pair, we learn they have been walking on their way since dawn from distant Chezzetcook: the man speaks English with a strong French accent; the maiden only the language of her people on the banks of the Seine.
"Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers,
Black were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the way-side:
Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses."
Who can help repeating the familiar words of the idyl amid such scenery, and in such a presence?
"We are now approaching a Negro settlement," said my compagnon de voyage after we had passed the Acadians; "and we will take a fresh horse at Deer's Castle; this is rough travelling." In a few minutes we saw a log house perched on a bare bone of granite that stood out on a ragged hill-side, and presently another cabin of the same kind came in view. Then other scare-crow edifices wheeled in sight as we drove along; all forlorn, all patched with mud, all perched on barren knolls, or gigantic bars of granite, high up, like ragged redoubts of poverty, armed at every window with a formidable artillery of old hats, rolls of rags, quilts, carpets, and indescribable bundles, or barricaded with boards to keep out the air and sunshine.
"You do not mean to say those wretched hovels are occupied by living beings?" said I to my companion.
"Oh yes," he replied, with a quiet smile, "these are your people, your fugitives."
"But, surely," said I, "they do not live in those airy nests during your intensely cold winters?"
"Yes," replied my companion, "and they have a pretty hard time of it. Between you and I," he continued, "they are a miserable set of devils; they won't work, and they shiver it out here as well as they can. During the most of the year they are in a state of abject want, and then they are very humble. But in the strawberry season they make a little money, and while it lasts are fat and saucy enough. We can't do anything with them, they won't work. There they are in their cabins, just as you see them, a poor, woe-begone set of vagabonds; a burden upon the community; of no use to themselves, nor to anybody else."
"Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope, who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, attend to the history of Rasselas, here in his happy valley."
"Now then," said my companion, as this trite quotation was passing through my mind. The wagon had stopped in front of a little, weather-beaten house that kept watch and ward over an acre of greensward, broken ever and anon with a projecting bone of granite, and not only fenced with stone, but dotted also with various mounds of pebbles, some as large as a paving-stone, and some much larger. This was "Deer's Castle." In front of the castle was a swing-sign with an inscription:
"William Deer, who lives here,
Keeps the best of wine and beer,
Brandy, and cider, and other good cheer;
Fish, and ducks, and moose, and deer.
Caught or shot in the woods just here,
With cutlets, or steaks, as will appear;
If you will stop you need not fear
But you will be well treated by William Deer,
And by Mrs. Deer, his dearest, deary dear!"
I quote from memory. The precise words have escaped me, but the above is the substance of the sense, and the metre is accurate.
It was a little, weather-beaten shanty of boards, that clung like flakes to the frame-work. A show-box of a room, papered with select wood-cuts from Punch and the Illustrated London News, was the grand banquet-hall of the castle. And indeed it was a castle compared with the wretched redoubts of poverty around it. Here we changed horses, or rather we exchanged our horse, for a diminutive, bantam pony, that, under the supervision of "Bill," was put inside the shafts and buckled up to the very roots of the harness. This Bill, the son and heir of the Castellen, was a good-natured yellow boy, about fifteen years of age, with such a development of under-lip and such a want of development elsewhere, that his head looked like a scoop. There was an infinite fund of humor in Billy, an uncontrollable sense of the comic, that would break out in spite of his grave endeavors to put himself under guard. It exhibited itself in his motions and gestures, in the flourish of his hands as he buckled up the pony, in the looseness of his gait, the swing of his head, and the roll of his eyes. His very language was pregnant with mirth; thus:
"Bill!"
"Cheh, cheh, sir? cheh."
"Is your father at home?"
"Cheh, cheh, father? cheh, cheh."
"Yes, your father?"
"Cheh, cheh, at home, sah? cheh."
"Yes, is your father at home?"
"I guess so, cheh, cheh."
"What is the matter with you, Bill? what are you laughing about?"
"Cheh, cheh, I don't know, sah, cheh, cheh."
"Well, take out the horse, and put in the pony; we want to go to Chizzencook."
"Cheh, Cheh'z'ncook? Yes, sah," and so with that facetious gait and droll twist of the elbow, Bill swings himself against the horse and unbuckles him in a perpetual jingle of merriment.
"And this," said I to my companion, as we looked from the door-step of the shanty upon the spiry tops of evergreens in the valley below us, and at the wretched log-huts that were roosting up on the bare rocks around us, "this is the negro settlement?"
"Yes," he replied.
"Are all the negro settlements in Nova Scotia as miserable, as this?"
"Yes," he answered; "you can tell a negro settlement at once by its appearance."
"Then," I thought to myself, "I would, for poor Cuffee's sake, that much-vaunted British sympathy and British philanthropy had something better to show to an admiring world than the prospect around Deer's Castle."
Notwithstanding the very generous banquet spread before the eyes of the traveller, on the sign-board, we were compelled to dismiss the pleasant fiction of the poet upon the announcement of Mrs. Deer, that "Nathin was in de house 'cept bacon," and she "reckoned" she "might have an egg or two by de time we got back from Chizzincook."
"But you have plenty of trout here in these streams?"
"Oh! yes, plenty, sah."
"Then let Bill catch some trout for us."
And so the pony being strapped up and buckled to the wagon, we left the negro settlement for the French settlement. They are all in "settlements," here, the people of this Province. Centuries are mutable, but prejudices never
