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192 unsophisticated conceits would furnish material for a genre novelist. Many villages on these retired inlets are not yet converted from a belief in the supernatural. Driving to Peggy's Cove, at the easterly side of the bay's entrance, or going by motor-boat, one passes humble settlements where door-sills are not infrequently crossed by visitors whose baleful influence only the witch-master can annul. This region given over to the superstitions and practices of an unworldly peasantry is but twenty miles removed from Halifax. Yet in the cottages one hears of exorcised spirits, of rites which have to do with crosses steeped in hemlock, and pigs' hearts stuck full of pins and thrown with mysterious purpose upon burning coals.

A house which faces Hubbards village is occupied by the son of an old-time captain whose name, John Dauphinée, was once the most powerful heard round-about the Cove, of which, indeed, he was called the monarch. He owned a brigantine and lesser vessels in the West India trade. He was captain of militia and his coat and sword, worn before the birth of the son who is now almost a nonagenarian, are preserved at the homestead. The parlour racks also hold ancient lamps shaped like a double-spouted coffee-pot, candle moulds, and a "Sam Slick clock" bought near a hundred years ago from a Yankee vendor, who, considering the traditional reluctance of this particular timepiece to tell time, must have exercised Sam Slick's