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of india-rubber, tobacco, and spirits. The stewardes was ill, and my companions were groaning; unheeded babies were crying; and the only pleasing feature in the scene was the gruff old pilot, ubiquitous in kindness, ever performing some act of humanity. At one moment he was holding smelling-salts to some exhausted lady—at another carrying down a poor Irishwoman, who, though a steerage passenger, should not, he said, be left to perish from cold and hunger—and again, feeding some crying baby with bread and milk. My clothes were completely saturated, and his good offices probably saved me from severe illness by covering me up with a blanket.
At twelve we reached Shediac in New Brunswick, a place from which an enormous quantity of timber it annually exported. It is a village in a marsh, on a large bay surrounded by low wooded hills, and presents every appearance of unhealthiness. Huge square-sided ships, English, Dutch, and Austrian, were swallowing up raft of pine which kept arriving from the shore. The water on this coast is shallow, and, though our steamer was not of more than 150 tons burthen, we were obliged to anchor nearly two miles from shore.
Shediac had recently been visited by the cholera, and there was an infectious melancholy about its aspect which, coupled with the fact that I was wet, cold, and weary, and with the discovery that my escort and I had not two ideas in common, had a tendency to produce anything but a lively frame of mind.
We and our luggage were unceremoniously trundled into two large boats, some of the gentlemen, I am sorry to say, forcing their way into the first, in order to secure