Page:Tourist's Maritime Provinces.djvu/134

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102
THE TOURIST'S MARITIME PROVINCES

lege and was graduated from its halls when he was nineteen. He married an English lady and practised law in Annapolis Royal. Nine years after being admitted to the bar he was appointed Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas for the Middle Division of Nova Scotia. In 1841 he first sat on the bench of the Supreme Court. He resigned his seat in 1856 and sailed for England, there to make his home until his death in 1865. For the last four years of his life he represented Launceston in the House of Commons, where he exerted a needed influence against the separation of Canada from the Empire, a measure advocated by Gladstone.

Haliburton wrote and published an Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia in 1829. The papers which introduced his canny-thinking, lean and sharp-nosed Connecticut Yankee pedlar to a delighted audience were first printed anonymously in Joe Howe's Nova Scotian in 1835. "Sam Slick of Slickville, Onion County," was created in the genial mansion which Judge Haliburton erected on an estate of forty acres near the college grounds, and which is the goal, even today, of every visitor to Windsor. Sam Slick, the Clockmaker, was an itinerant vendor of wooden time-pieces with whom the Squire (Judge Haliburton) rode along the Nova Scotia roads and discussed policies, politics, traits and failings