No. III The Silent Girls
“Do you see them ’ere swallows,” said the Clockmaker, “how low they fly? Well I presume we shall have rain right away; and them noisy critters, them gulls how close they keep to the water, down there in the Shubenacadie; well that’s a sure sign. If we study natur’, we don’t want no thermometer. But I guess we shall be in time to get under cover in a shingle-maker’s shed about three miles ahead on us. We had just reached the deserted hovel when the rain fell in torrents.
“I reckon,” said the Clockmaker, as he sat himself down on a bundle of shingles, “I reckon they are bad off for inns in this country. When a feller is too lazy to work here, he paints his name over his door, and calls it a tavern, and as like as not he makes the whole neighbourhood as lazy as himself—it is about as easy to find a good inn in Halifax, as it is to find wool on a goat’s back. An inn, to be a good consarn, must be built a purpose, you can no more make a good tavern out of a common dwelling house, I expect, than a good coat out of an old pair of trousers. They are etarnal lazy, you may depend—now there might be a grand spec made there, in building a good inn and a good church.”
“What a sacrilegious and unnatural union,” said I, with most unaffected surprise.
“Not at all,” said Mr. Slick; “we build both on speculation in the States, and make a good deal of profit out of ’em too, I tell you. We look out a good sightly place, in a town like Halifax, that is pretty considerably well peopled, with folks that are good marks; and if there is no real right down good preacher among them, we build a handsome Church, touched off like a New York liner, a real taking looking thing—and then we look out for a preacher, a crack man, a regular ten horse power chap—well, we hire him, and we have to give pretty high wages too, say twelve hundred or sixteen hundred dollars a year. We take him at first on trial for a Sabbath or two, to try his paces, and if he takes with the folks, if he goes down well, we clinch the bargain, and let and sell the pews; and, I tell you it pays well and makes a real good investment. There were few better specs among us than inns and churches, until the railroads came on the carpet; as soon as the novelty of the new preacher wears off, we hire another, and that keeps up the steam.”
“I trust it will be long, very long, my friend,” said I, “ere the rage for speculation introduces ‘the money-changers into the temple,’ with us.”
Mr. Slick looked at me with a most ineffable expression of pity and surprise. “Depend on it, sir,” said he, with a most philosophical air, “this Province is much behind the intelligence of the age. But if it is behind us in that respect, it is a long chalk ahead on us in others. I never seed or heerd tell of a country that had so many natural privileges as this. Why, there are twice as many harbours and water-powers here, as we have all the way from Eastport to New OrLEENS. They have all they can ax, and more than they desarve. They have iron, coal, slate, grindstone, lime, firestone, gypsum, free-stone, and a list as long as an auctioneer’s catalogue. But they are either asleep, or stone blind to them. Their shores are crowded with fish, and their lands covered with wood. A government that lays as light on ’em as a down counterp’in, and no taxes. Then look at their dykes. The Lord seems to have made ’em on purpose for such lazy folks. If you were to tell the citizens of our country that these dykes had been cropped for a hundred years without manure, they’d say, they guessed you had seen Col. Crockett, the greatest hand at a flam in our nation. You have heerd tell of a man who couldn’t see London for the houses? I tell you, if we had this country, you couldn’t see the harbours for the shipping. There’d be a rush of folks to it, as there is in one of our inns, to the dinner table, when they sometimes get jammed together in the door-way, and a man has to take a running leap over their heads, afore he can get in. A little nigger boy in New York found a diamond worth two thousand dollars; well, he sold it to a watchmaker for fifty cents—the little critter didn’t know no better. Your people are just like the nigger boy—they don’t know the value of their diamond.
“Do you know the reason monkeys are no good? because they chatter all day long; so do the niggers, and so do the Bluenoses of Nova Scotia; it’s all talk and no work. Now, with us it’s all work and no talk; in our ship yards, our factories, our mills, and even in our vessels, there’s no talk; a man can’t work and talk too. I guess if you were at the factories at Lowell we’d show you a wonder—five hundred gals at work together, all in silence. I don’t think our great country has such a real natural curiosity as that—I expect the world don’t contain the beat of that; for a woman’s tongue goes so slick of itself, without water power or steam, and moves so easy on its hinges, that it’s no easy matter to put a spring stop on it, I tell you—it comes as natural as drinkin’ mint julip.
“I don’t pretend to say the gals don’t nullify the rule, sometimes at intermission and arter hours, but when they do, if they don’t let go, then it’s a pity. You have heerd a school come out, of little boys? Lord, it’s no touch to it. Or a flock of geese at it? They are no more a match for ’em than a pony is for a coach-horse. But when they are at work, all’s as still as sleep and no snoring. I guess we have a right to brag o’ that invention—we trained the dear critters, so they don’t think of striking the minutes and seconds no longer.
“Now the folks of Halifax take it all out in talking. They talk of steamboats, whalers and railroads; but they all end where they begin—in talk. I don’t think I’d be out in my latitude if I was to say they beat the womenkind at that. One feller says, ‘I talk of going to England;’ another says, ‘I talk of going to the country;’ while a third says, ‘I talk of going to sleep.’ If we happen to speak of such things, we say, ‘I’m right off down East;’ or ‘I’m away off South,’ and away we go, jist like a streak of lightning.
“When we want folks to talk, we pay ’em for it, such as ministers, lawyers, and members of Congress; but then we expect the use of their tongues, and not their hands; and when we pay folks to work, we expect the use of their hands, and not their tongues. I guess work don’t come kind o’ natural to the people of this Province, no more than it does to a full-bred horse. I expect they think they have a little too much blood in ’em for work, for they are near about as proud as they are lazy.
“Now the bees know how to sarve out such chaps, for they have their drones too. Well they reckon it’s no fun, a-makin’ honey all summer, for these idle critters to eat all winter, so they give ’em Lynch Law. They have a regular built mob of citizens, and string up the drones like the Vicksburg gamblers. Their maxim is, and not a bad one neither I guess, ‘no work, no honey.’”