The Steam boat Hotel, a raw, plank-built house, with a double veranda, fronts the harbour. The guests consisted of certain permanent boarders and accidental travellers, who, with visitors, their friends, all mess at one common table. On this occasion the dinner-party consisted of seventeen, the majority of whom, being inhabitants of the province, had generally that peculiar lassitude of manner about them, which I had remarked in the passengers by the steam-boat. They consumed the viands in silence, with an earnestness that betokened the sincerity of their appetites.

But although taciturnity was the prevalent characteristic of the company, I observed two conspicuous exceptions: one of them, an old shrewd Scotchman, by his accent from Renfrewshire. Like all his countrymen of the same grade in station, he garnished his dry remarks with humour; liable at first to lead his auditors to undervalue their justness. I gathered, from a jocular conversation he was holding with the other gentleman, that he had been something of a radical in the old country, but that in coming to this, he had been converted, as he said himself, into more “rationality;”—a natural effect of Colonial circumstances, where persons in authority, being more on a par with the other inhabitants than those at home, are, in consequence, regarded with less respect, and their “phantastic tricks” spoken of with keener resentment, even when their conduct deserves more indulgent consideration. His heart was evidently in the old country; and from the feeling alluded to, he described the ascendant influences of the colony as of a far inferior kind to those which affected the condition of the people at home.