REVIEWS THE ENGLISHWOMAN IN AMERICA. 131 



"We want to invest some of our surplus revenue/' said the Captain. " It will 

 be a good spec when Congress buys these colonies ; some of our ten-horse power 

 chaps will come down, and before you could whistle ' Yankee Doodle,' we'll have 

 a canal to Bay Varte, with a town as big as Newhaven at each end. The Blue 

 Noses will look kinder streaked then, I guess." 



Our observant traveller visits in succession, the various British 

 American Colonies, and while she sees much to admire and wonder at, 

 in the evidence of enterprise and rapid progress, she also repeatedly 

 finds occasion to draw comparisons between the eastern Colonies and 

 the neighbouring States, not always very favorable to the former. She 

 exhibits, indeed, — as an Englishwoman speaking of British Colonies, — - 

 some of that candor which a friend occasionally claims the liberty 

 to indiilge in : giving expression to truths more wholesome than pleas- 

 ant, and relieving her mind thereby of some of the pent-up spirit of 

 critical observation, which she has discovered might not be very well 

 received by her American friends. Some of her colonial comments 

 are certainly sufficiently plain spoken. After commending the sum- 

 mer beauty of Prince Edward Island, " The garden of British Ameri- 

 ca," its highly favored climate, good wages, abundant employment, 

 land cheap yet productive, wood plentiful, and the main occupation of 

 the Islanders : ship-building, a most profitable trade ; the reverse 

 follows, in such an over-dra\^^l picture of " the dull, cheerless, deso- 

 late winter," as the unexperienced invariably associate with our Cana- 

 dian frosts and snows. We shall condense one or two of her piquant 

 pencillings of Prince Edward Island : 



Charlotte Town, the capital of the Island, and the Seat of Government, is 

 very prettily situated on a capacious harbor. With the exception of Quebec it is 

 considered the prettiest town in British America ; but while Quebec is a city 

 built on a rock, Charlotte Town closely borders upon a marsh, and its drainage 



has been very much neglected The houses are small, and the stores 



by no means pretentious. The streets are unlighted, and destitute of side-walks ; 

 there is not an attempt at paving, and the grips across them are something fear- 

 ful. ' Hold on ' is a caution as frequently given as abolutely necessary. I have 

 travelled over miles of corduroy road in a springless waggon, and in a lumber 

 waggon drawn by oxen where there was no road at all, but I never experienced 

 anything like the merciless, joint-dislocating jolting which I met with in Charlotte 

 Town. This island Metropolis has two or three weekly papers of opposite sides 

 impolitics, which vie with each other in gross personalities and scurrilous abuse, 

 . The House of Assembly is said to be on a par with Irish poor-law 

 guardian meetings for low personalities and vehement vituperation. 



The genius of discord must look complacently on this land. Politics have 

 been a fruitful source of quarrels, misrepresentation, alienation, and division. 

 The opposition parties are locally designated snatchers and snarlers, and no love is 

 lost between tb two. It is broadly affirmed that half the people on the island 



