[242] older to place it before our readers at an early moment, we made arrangements some weeks since to start a horse Express from Halifax across Nova Scotia to the Bay of Fundy, there to meet a powerful steamer which will convey our Agent and Messenger to Portland. At the latter place we run a Locomotive Express to Boston, whence we express it by steam and horsepower to New York. Should no unforeseen accident occur, we will be enabled by this Express to publish the news in New York some ten, or perhaps fifteen or twenty hours before the arrival of the steamer in Boston. The extent of this enterprise may in part be judged of by the fact, that we pay no less than Eighteen Hundred Dollars for the single trip of the steamer on the Bay of Fundy! It is but fair to add that, in this Express, we were joined from the commencement by the Sun of this city, and the North American of Philadelphia; and the Journal of Commerce has also since united with us in the enterprise.
We were beaten with the news yesterday morning, owing to circumstances which no human energy could overcome. In spite of the great snow-storm, which covered Nova Scotia with drifts several feet high, impeding and often overturning our express-sleigh—in defiance of hard ice in the Bay of Fundy and this side, often 18 inches thick, through which our steamboat had to plow her way—we brought the news through to Boston in thirty-one hours from Halifax, several hours ahead of the Cambria herself. Thence it ought to have reached this city by 6 o'clock yesterday morning, in ample season to have gone south in the regular mail train. It was delayed, however, by unforeseen and unavoidable disasters, and only reached New Haven after it should have been in this city. From New Haven it was brought hither in four hours and a half by our ever-trusty rider, Enoch Ward, who never lets the grass grow to the heels of his horses. He came in a little after 11 o'clock, but the rival express had got in over two hours earlier, having made the shortest run from Boston on record.
The Portland Bulletin has been unintentionally led into the gross error of believing the audacious fabrication that Bennett's express came through to this city in seven hours and five minutes from Boston, beating ours five or six hours! That express left Boston at 11 P. M. of Wednesday, and arrived here 20 minutes past 9 on Thursday—actual time on the road, over ten hours. The Bulletin further says that our express was sixteen hours on the road. No such thing. We lost some fifteen minutes at the ferry on the east side of Boston. Then a very short time (instead of an hour and a half, as is reported by the express) in finding our agent in Boston; then an hour in firing up an engine and getting away from Boston, where all should have been ready for us, but was not. The locomotive was over two hours in making the run to Worcester—42 miles—though the Herald runner who came through on the arrival of the Cambria
