I Will now resume the thread of my personal narrative since arriving at St. John's. When the last echoes of the cheers that rose from the thousands of loyal New Brunswickers collected on the wharves, and casting one last, long, lingering look at the young man waving his hat from the paddle–box gangway of the receding steamer Styx, had died away, I bent my steps from the water–side into the shop–closed streets, where all of the few people I saw were idling through a general holiday, and where the triumphal arches were still spanning the streets in all the ghastliness of their decayed finery. The towns reminded me of a dining hall after the feast, a ball–room after the guests had departed. The spirit that had inspired the masses of the population with new life had gone, and here alone remained the wreck of the past. But, after all, it was not magnificent—not splendid—ruin ; for there is but little magnificence or splendor of cither thought or action about the slow–going inhabitants of this long–wintered colony ; and it required an effort, the most extreme of which their unemotional nature was capable, to arouse them even to the tame demonstration which they made. This says nothing against their loyalty—nothing against their love of country—but it shows that their susceptibility to external influences is slight, and that what would fill a Frenchman with the bubbling gayety of extreme ardor, and make a New Yorker boil over with the excitement of enthusiasm, would upon a native of New Brunswick produce hardly any impression deeper than would be caused by the common every–day events of life.