Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/215

not so very much from any other night. The head of the house is not concerned about the marketing or telephoning to his grocer. The maid is not particulary anxious to go "down town." The family bath tub may be produced, (and on Monday morning it will be used for the family washing) but the hot water will not be drawn from the tap. The family retire at an early hour, nor are their slumbers likely to be disturbed by fire alarm or midnight train. And yet in the olden times the |men, we doubt not, were wont to meet on Saturday nights at the little store at the Point to compare notes and to talk over the few topics of interest in their rather monotonous lives. We seem to see them now, a little coterie, nearly all of them engaged in the Company's employ—mill hands, fishermen, lime burners, laborers, while in a corner James White pores over his ledger, posting his accounts by the dim light of his candle and now and again mending his goose quill pen. But even at the store the cheerful company soon disperses; the early closing system evidently prevails, the men seek their several abodes and one by one the lights in the little windows vanish. There is only one thing to prevent the entire population from being in good time for church on Sunday morning, and that is there isn't any church for them to attend.

Then and now! We turn from our contemplation of Saturday night as we have imagined it in 1764 to look for a moment at a modern Saturday night in the city of St. John. What contrast greater can be imagined? Where once were dismal shades of woods and swamps we have a moving gaily chattering crowd, a mass of living humanity that throngs the walks of Union, King and Charlotte streets. The feeble glimmer of the tallow candle from the windows of the houses of the few settlers at Portland Point has given place to the blaze of hundreds of electric lights that