But now we ride by the Shubenacadie lakes, a chain--a bracelet--binding the province from the Basin of Minas to the seaboard. The eye never tires of this lovely feature of Acadia. Lake above lake--the division, the isthmus between, not wider than the breadth of your India shawl, my lady! I must declare that, all in all, the scenery of the province is surpassingly beautiful. As you ride by these sparkling waters, through the flowery, bowery, woods, you feel as if you like to pitch tent here--at least for the summer. And now we approach a rustic inn by the roadside, rich in shrubbery before it, and green moss from ridge-pole to low drooping eaves, where we change horses. And as we rest here upon the wooden inn-porch, dismounted from our high perch on the stage-coach, we see right above us against the clear evening sky, Her Majesty's _ci-devant_ partisan, now prisoner--by merit raised to that bad eminence. The officer hands him a glass of brandy, to keep up his spirits. The prisoner takes it, and, lifting the glass high in air, shouts out with the exultation of a fiend: "Here's to the hinges of liberty--may they never want oil, Nor an Orangeman's bones in a pot for to boil." Once more upon the stage to Dartmouth, where we deposit our precious fellow-travellers, and then to the ferry, and look you! across the harbor, the twinkling lights of dear old mouldy Halifax. And now we are crossing Chebucto, and the cab carries us again to our former quarters in the Hotel Waverley. CHAPTER XIV. Halifax again--Hotel Waverley--"Gone the Old Familiar Faces"--The Story of Marie de la Tour. Again in old quarters! It is strange how we become attached to a place, be it what it may, if we only have known it before. The same old room we occupied years ago, however comfortless then, has a familiar air of welcome now. There is surely some little trace of self, some unseen spider-thread of attachment clinging to the walls, the old chair, the forlorn wash-stand, and the knobby four-poster, that holds the hardest of beds, the most consumptive of pillows, and a bolster as round, as white, and as hard, as a cathedral mass-candle. Heigho, Hotel Waverley! Here am I again; but where are the familiar faces? Where the brave soldier of Inkerman and Balaklava? Where the jolly old Captain of the native rifles? Where the Colonel, with his little meerschaum pipe he was so intent upon coloring? Where the party of salmon-fishermen, the Solomons of piscatology? Where the passengers by the "Canada?" And where is Picton? Gone, like last year's birds! "A glass of ale, Henry, and one cigar, only _one_; I wish to be solitary."