I heard of a feeble lecture-course in Halifax,
supplied by local celebrities, some of them from St. John; but so far
as I can see, this is a virgin field for the platform philosophers
under whose instructions we have become the well-informed people we
are.
The peaceful jail and the somewhat tiresome church exhaust one's
opportunities for doing good in Baddeck on Sunday. There seemed to
be no idlers about, to reprove; the occasional lounger on the
skeleton wharves was in his Sunday clothes, and therefore within the
statute. No one, probably, would have thought of rowing out beyond
the island to fish for cod,--although, as that fish is ready to bite,
and his associations are more or less sacred, there might be excuses
for angling for him on Sunday, when it would be wicked to throw a
line for another sort of fish. My earliest recollections are of the
codfish on the meeting-house spires in New England,--his sacred tail
pointing the way the wind went. I did not know then why this emblem
should be placed upon a house of worship, any more than I knew why
codfish-balls appeared always upon the Sunday breakfast-table. But
these associations invested this plebeian fish with something of a
religious character, which he has never quite lost, in my mind.
Having attributed the quiet of Baddeck on Sunday to religion, we did
not know to what to lay the quiet on Monday.
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