Acadia: or, A Month with the Blue NosesCozzens, Frederic S. (Frederic Swartwout)
History
Acadia: or, A Month with the Blue Noses
Cozzens, Frederic S. (Frederic Swartwout)
Nova Scotia -- Description and travel
Meantime the good lady of the hutch was busy arranging some tumblers on
the table, and to our great surprise and delight a huge yellow pitcher of
milk soon made its appearance, and immediately after an old-fashioned iron
bake-pan, with an upper crust of live embers and ashes, was lifted off the
chimney trammel, and when it was opened, the fragrance of hot ginger-bread
filled the apartment. Then Red-Cap bobbed away at a corner cupboard, until
he extracted therefrom a small keg or runlet of St. Croix rum of most ripe
age and choice flavor, some of which, by an adroit and experienced crook
of the elbow, he managed to insinuate into the milk, which, with a little
brown sugar, he stirred up carefully and deliberately with a large spoon,
Picton and I watching the proceedings with intense interest. Then the
punch was poured out and handed around; while the good wife made little
trips from guest to guest with a huge platter filled with the brown and
fragrant pieces of the cake, fresh from the bake-pan. And so the baby
having subsided (our baby of the "Balaklava"), and the twilight having
given place to a grand moonlight on the bay, and the fire sending out its
beams of warmth and happiness, glittering on the utensils of the dresser,
and tenderly touching with rosy light the cheeks of the small,
white-headed fishermen on the margin of the patchwork quilt; while there
was no lack of punch and hospitality in the yellow pitcher, who shall say
that we were not as well off in the fisherman's hutch as in a grand
saloon, surrounded with frescoes and flunkeys, and served with thin
lemonade upon trays of silver?
I do not know why it is, but there always has been something very
attractive to me in the faces of children; I love to read the physiognomy
of posterity, and so get a history of the future world in miniature,
before the book itself is fairly printed. And insomuch as Nova Scotia and
Newfoundland are said to be the nurseries of England's seamen, it was with
no little interest that I caught a glimpse of two boys, one thirteen, the
other eleven years old, the eldest children of our friend Red-Cap.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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