University of Virginia Library

DEAR GIRLS: Since the letter I wrote
you a day or two after we got here, we
have been going on very much as you
might have expected. A whole week has passed,
but we still bear our enforced leisure with fortitude;
and, though Boston and New York are both
fading into the improbable (as far as we are concerned),
Quebec continues inexhaustible, and I
don't begrudge a moment of the time we are giving
it.

Fanny still keeps her sofa; the first enthusiasm
of her affliction has worn away, and she has nothing
to sustain her now but planning our expeditions
about the city. She has got the map and
the history of Quebec by heart, and she holds us
to the literal fulfilment of her instructions. On
this account, she often has to send Dick and me
out together when she would like to keep him with
her, for she won't trust either of us alone, and
when we come back she examines us separately

to see whether we have skipped anything. This
makes us faithful in the smallest things. She says
she is determined that Uncle Jack shall have a full
and circumstantial report from me of all that he
wants to know about the celebrated places here,
and I really think he will, if I go on, or am goaded
on, in this way. It 's pure devotion to the cause
in Fanny, for you know she does n't care for such
things herself, and has no pleasure in it but carrying
a point. Her chief consolation under her trial
of keeping still is to see how I look in her different
dresses. She sighs over me as I appear in a new
garment, and says, O, if she only had the dressing
of me! Then she gets up and limps and hops
across the room to where I stand before the glass,
and puts a pin here and a ribbon there, and gives
my hair (which she has dressed herself) a little
dab, to make it lie differently, and then scrambles
back to her sofa, and knocks her lame ankle against
something, and lies there groaning and enjoying
herself like a martyr. On days when she thinks
she is never going to get well, she says she does n't
know why she does n't give me her things at once
and be done with it; and on days when she thinks
she is going to get well right away, she says she
will have me one made something like whatever
dress I have got on, as soon as she 's home. Then
up she 'll jump again for the exact measure, and
tell me the history of every stitch, and how she 'll
have it altered just the least grain, and differently
trimmed to suit my complexion better; and ends
by having promised to get me something not in
the least like it. You have some idea already of
what Fanny is; and all you have got to do is to
multiply it by about fifty thousand. Her sprained
ankle simply intensifies her whole character.

Besides helping to compose Fanny's expeditionary
corps, and really exerting himself in the cause
of Uncle Jack, as he calls it, Dick is behaving
beautifully. Every morning, after breakfast, he
goes over to the hotel, and looks at the arrivals
and reads the newspapers, and though we never
get anything out of him afterwards, we somehow
feel informed of all that is going on. He has
taken to smoking a clay pipe in honor of the Canadian
fashion, and he wears a gay, barbaric scarf
of Indian muslin wound round his hat and flying
out behind; because the Quebeckers protect themselves
in that way against sunstroke when the thermometer
gets up among the sixties. He has also
bought a pair of snow-shoes to be prepared for the
other extreme of weather, in case anything else
should happen to Fanny, and detain us into the
winter. When he has rested from his walk to the

hotel, we usually go out together and explore, as
we do also in the afternoon; and in the evening
we walk on Durham Terrace, — a promenade overlooking
the river, where the whole cramped and
crooked city goes for exercise. It 's a formal parade
in the evening; but one morning I went
there before breakfast, for a change, and found it
the resort of careless ease; two or three idle boys
were sunning themselves on the carriages of the
big guns that stand on the Terrace, a little dog
was barking at the chimneys of the Lower Town,
and an old gentleman was walking up and down
in his dressing-gown and slippers, just as if it were
his own front porch. He looked something like
Uncle Jack, and I wished it had been he, — to see
the smoke curling softly up from the Lower Town,
the bustle about the market-place, and the shipping
in the river, and the haze hanging over the
water a little way off, and the near hills all silver,
and the distant ones blue.

But if we are coming to the grand and the beautiful,
why, there is no direction in which you can
look about Quebec without seeing it; and it is
always mixed up with something so familiar and
homelike, that my heart warms to it. The Jesuit
Barracks are just across the street from us in the
foreground of the most magnificent landscape; the

building is — think, you Eriecreekers of an hour!
— two hundred years old, and it looks five hundred.
The English took it away from the Jesuits
in 1760, and have used it as barracks ever since;
but it is n't in the least changed, so that a Jesuit
missionary who visited it the other day said that it
was as if his brother priests had been driven out of
it the week before. Well, you might think so old
and so historical a place would be putting on airs,
but it takes as kindly to domestic life as a new
frame-house, and I am never tired of looking over
into the yard at the frowsy soldiers' wives hanging
out clothes, and the unkempt children playing
among the burdocks, and chickens and cats, and
the soldiers themselves carrying about the officers'
boots, or sawing wood and picking up chips to
boil the teakettle. They are off dignity as well
as off duty, then; but when they are on both, and
in full dress, they make our volunteers (as I remember
them) seem very shabby and slovenly.

Over the belfry of the Barracks, our windows
command a view of half Quebec, with its roofs and
spires dropping down the slope to the Lower
Town, where the masts of the ships in the river
come tapering up among them, and then of the
plain stretching from the river in the valley to a
range of mountains against the horizon, with far-off

white villages glimmering out of their purple
folds. The whole plain is bright with houses and
harvest-fields; and the distinctly divided farms —
the owners cut them up every generation, and give
each son a strip of the entire length — run back
on either hand, from the straight roads bordered
by poplars, while the highways near the city pass
between lovely villas.

But this landscape and the Jesuit Barracks,
with all their merits, are nothing to the Ursuline
Convent, just under our back windows, which I
told you something about in my other letter. We
have been reading up its history since, and we
know about Madame de la Peltrie, the noble Norman
lady who founded it in 1640. She was very
rich and very beautiful, and a saint from the
beginning, so that when her husband died, and her
poor old father wanted her to marry again and not
go into a nunnery, she did n't mind cheating him
by a sham marriage with a devout gentleman;
and she came to Canada as soon as her father was
dead, with another saint, Marie de l'Incarnation,
and founded this convent. The first building is
standing yet, as strong as ever, though everything
but the stone walls was burnt two centuries
ago. Only a few years since an old ash-tree,
under which the Ursulines first taught the Indian

children, blew down, and now a large black cross
marks its place. The modern nuns are in the
garden nearly the whole morning long, and by
night the ghosts of the former nuns haunt it; and
in very bright moonlight I myself do a bit of
Madame de la Peltrie there, and teach little Indian
boys, who dwindle like those in the song, as the
moon goes down. It is an enchanted place, and I
wish we had it in the back yard at Eriecreek,
though I don't think the neighbors would approve
of the architecture. I have adopted two nuns for
my own: one is tall and slender and pallid, and
you can see at a glance that she broke the heart
of a mortal lover, and knew it, when she became
the bride of heaven; and the other is short and
plain and plump, and looks as comfortable and
commonplace as life-after-dinner. When the world
is bright I revel in the statue-like sadness of the
beautiful nun, who never laughs or plays with the
little girl pupils; but when the world is dark —
as the best of worlds will be at times for a minute
or two — I take to the fat nun, and go in for a
clumsy romp with the children; and then I fancy
that I am wiser if not better than the fair slim
Ursuline. But whichever I am, for the time
being, I am vexed with the other; yet they always
are together, as if they were counterparts.
I think a nice story might be written about
them.

In Wolfe's siege of Quebec this Ursuline Garden
of ours was everywhere torn up by the falling bombs,
and the sisters were driven out into the world
they had forsaken forever, as Fanny has been
reading in a little French account of the events,
written at the time, by a nun of the General
Hospital. It was there the Ursulines took what
refuge there was; going from their cloistered
school-rooms and their innocent little ones to the
wards of the hospital, filled with the wounded and
dying of either side, and echoing with their dreadful
groans. What a sad, evil, bewildering world
they had a glimpse of! In the garden here, our
poor Montcalm — I belong to the French side,
please, in Quebec — was buried in a grave dug for
him by a bursting shell. They have his skull now
in the chaplain's room of the convent, where we
saw it the other day. They have made it comfortable
in a glass box, neatly bound with black,
and covered with a white lace drapery, just as if it
were a saint's. It was broken a little in taking it
out of the grave; and a few years ago, some English
officers borrowed it to look at, and were horrible
enough to pull out some of the teeth. Tell
Uncle Jack the head is very broad above the ears,
but the forehead is small.

The chaplain also showed us a copy of an old
painting of the first convent, Indian lodges, Madame
de la Peltrie's house, and Madame herself,
very splendidly dressed, with an Indian chief before
her, and some French cavaliers riding down an
avenue towards her. Then he showed us some of
the nuns' work in albums, painted and lettered in
a way to give me an idea of old missals. By and
by he went into the chapel with us, and it gave
such a queer notion of his indoors life to have him
put on an overcoat and india-rubbers to go a few
rods through the open air to the chapel door: he
had not been very well, he said. When he got in,
he took off his hat, and put on an octagonal priest's
cap, and showed us everything in the kindest way
— and his manners were exquisite. There were
beautiful paintings sent out from France at the
time of the Revolution; and wood-carvings round
the high-altar, done by Quebec artists in the beginning
of the last century; for he said they had
a school of arts then at St. Anne's, twenty miles
below the city. Then there was an ivory crucifix,
so life-like that you could scarcely bear to
look at it. But what I most cared for was the
tiny twinkle of a votive lamp which he pointed out
to us in one corner of the nuns' chapel: it was lit
a hundred and fifty years ago by two of our French

officers when their sister took the veil, and has
never been extinguished since, except during the
siege of 1759. Of course, I think a story might
be written about this; and the truth is, the possibilities
of fiction in Quebec are overpowering;
I go about in a perfect haze of romances, and
meet people at every turn who have nothing to do
but invite the passing novelist into their houses,
and have their likenesses done at once for heroes
and heroines. They need n't change a thing about
them, but sit just as they are; and if this is in
the present, only think how the whole past of
Quebec must be crying out to be put into historical
romances!

I wish you could see the houses, and how
substantial they are. I can only think of Eriecreek
as an assemblage of huts and bark-lodges in
contrast. Our boarding-house is comparatively
slight, and has stone walls only a foot and a half
thick, but the average is two feet and two and a
half; and the other day Dick went through the
Laval University, — he goes everywhere and gets
acquainted with everybody, — and saw the foundation
walls of the first building, which have stood
all the sieges and conflagrations since the seventeenth
century; and no wonder, for they are six
feet thick, and form a series of low-vaulted corridors,

as heavy, he says, as the casemates of a
fortress. There is a beautiful old carved staircase
there, of the same date; and he liked the president,
a priest, ever so much; and we like the
looks of all the priests we see; they are so handsome
and polite, and they all speak English, with
some funny little defect. The other day, we asked
such a nice young priest about the way to Hare
Point, where it is said the Recollet friars had their
first mission on the marshy meadows: he did n't
know of this bit of history, and we showed him
our book. “Ah! you see, the book say `pro-bably
the site.' If it had said certainly, I should have
known. But pro-bab-ly, pro-bab-ly, you see!”
However, he showed us the way, and down we
went through the Lower Town, and out past the
General Hospital to this Pointe aux Lièvres, which
is famous also because somewhere near it, on the
St. Charles, Jacques Cartier wintered in 1536, and
kidnapped the Indian king Donnacona, whom he
carried to France. And it was here Montcalm's
forces tried to rally after their defeat by Wolfe.
(Please read this several times to Uncle Jack, so
that he can have it impressed upon him how
faithful I am in my historical researches.)

It makes me dreadfully angry and sad to think
the French should have been robbed of Quebec,

after what they did to build it. But it is still
quite a French city in everything, even to sympathy
with France in this Prussian war, which you
would hardly think they would care about. Our
landlady says the very boys in the street know
about the battles, and explain, every time the
French are beaten, how they were outnumbered
and betrayed, — something the way we used to do
in the first of our war.

I suppose you will think I am crazy; but I do
wish Uncle Jack would wind up his practice at
Eriecreek, and sell the house, and come to live
at Quebec. I have been asking prices of things,
and I find that everything is very cheap, even
according to the Eriecreek standard; we could
get a beautiful house on the St. Louis Road
for two hundred a year; beef is ten or twelve
cents a pound, and everything else in proportion.
Then besides that, the washing is sent out into
the country to be done by the peasant-women,
and there is n't a crumb of bread baked in the
house, but it all comes from the bakers; and only
think, girls, what a relief that would be! Do get
Uncle Jack to consider it seriously.

Since I began this letter the afternoon has
worn away — the light from the sunset on the
mountains would glorify our supper-table without

extra charge, if we lived here — and the twilight
has passed, and the moon has come up over the
gables and dormer-windows of the convent, and
looks into the garden so invitingly that I can't
help joining her. So I will put my writing by till
to-morrow. The going-to-bed bell has rung, and
the red lights have vanished one by one from the
windows, and the nuns are asleep, and another set
of ghosts is playing in the garden with the coppercolored
phantoms of the Indian children of long
ago. What! not Madame de la Peltrie? Oh!
how do they like those little fibs of yours up in
heaven?

Sunday afternoon. — As we were at the French
cathedral last Sunday, we went to the English
to-day; and I could easily have imagined myself
in some church of Old England, hearing the royal
family prayed for, and listening to the pretty poor
sermon delivered with such an English brogue.
The people, too, had such Englishy faces and such
queer little eccentricities of dress; the young lady
that sang contralto in the choir wore a scarf like
a man's on her hat. The cathedral is n't much,
architecturally, I suppose, but it affected me very
solemnly, and I could n't help feeling that it was
as much a part of British power and grandeur as
the citadel itself. Over the bishop's seat drooped

the flag of a Crimean regiment, tattered by time
and battles, which was hung up here with great
ceremonies, in 1860, when the Prince of Wales
presented them with new colors; and up in the
gallery was a kind of glorified pew for royal highnesses
and governor-generals and so forth, to sit in
when they are here. There are tablets and monumental
busts about the walls; and one to the
memory of the Duke of Lenox, the governor-general
who died in the middle of the last century from
the bite of a fox; which seemed an odd fate for a
duke, and somehow made me very sorry for him.

Fanny, of course, could n't go to church with
me, and Dick got out of it by lingering too late
over the newspapers at the hotel, and so I trudged
off with our Bostonian, who is still with us here.
I did n't dwell much upon him in my last letter,
and I don't believe now I can make him quite
clear to you. He has been a good deal abroad,
and he is Europeanized enough not to think much
of America, though I can't find that he quite
approves of Europe, and his experience seems not
to have left him any particular country in either
hemisphere.

He is n't the Bostonian of Uncle Jack's imagination,
and I suspect he would n't like to be. He
is rather too young, still, to have much of an antislavery

record, and even if he had lived soon
enough, I think that he would not have been a
John Brown man. I am afraid that he believes in
“vulgar and meretricious distinctions” of all sorts,
and that he has n't an atom of “magnanimous
democracy” in him. In fact, I find, to my great
astonishment, that some ideas which I thought
were held only in England, and which I had never
seriously thought of, seem actually a part of Mr.
Arbuton's nature or education. He talks about
the lower classes, and tradesmen, and the best
people, and good families, as I supposed nobody
in this country ever did, — in earnest. To be sure,
I have always been reading of characters who
had such opinions, but I thought they were just
put into novels to eke out somebody's unhappiness,
— to keep the high-born daughter from marrying
beneath her for love, and so on; or else to
be made fun of in the person of some silly old
woman or some odious snob; and I could hardly
believe at first that our Bostonian was serious in
talking in that way. Such things sound so differently
in real life; and I laughed at them till I
found that he did n't know what to make of my
laughing, and then I took leave to differ with him
in some of his notions; but he never disputes anything
I say, and so makes it seem rude to differ
with him. I always feel, though he begins it,
as if I had thrust my opinions upon him. But
in spite of his weaknesses and disagreeabilities,
there is something really high about him; he is so
scrupulously true, so exactly just, that Uncle Jack
himself could n't be more so; though you can see
that he respects his virtues as the peculiar result
of some extraordinary system. Here at Quebec,
though he goes round patronizing the landscape
and the antiquities, and coldly smiling at my little
enthusiasms, there is really a great deal that ought
to be at least improving in him. I get to paying
him the same respect that he pays himself, and
imbues his very clothes with, till everything he
has on appears to look like him and respect itself
accordingly. I have often wondered what his hat,
his honored hat, for instance, would do, if I should
throw it out of the front window. It would make
an earthquake, I believe.

He is politely curious about us; and from time
to time, in a shrinking, disgusted way, he asks
some leading question about Eriecreek, which he
does n't seem able to form any idea of, as much as
I explain it. He clings to his original notion, that
it is in the heart of the Oil Regions, of which he
has seen pictures in the illustrated papers; and
when I assert myself against his opinions, he

treats me very gingerly, as if I were an explosive
sprite, or an inflammable naiad from a torpedoed
well, and it would n't be quite safe to oppose me,
or I would disappear with a flash and a bang.

When Dick is n't able to go with me on Fanny's
account, Mr. Arbuton takes his place in the expeditionary
corps; and we have visited a good many
points of interest together, and now and then he
talks very entertainingly about his travels. But I
don't think they have made him very cosmopolitan.
It seems as if he went about with a little
imaginary standard, and was chiefly interested in
things, to see whether they fitted it or not. Trifling
matters annoy him; and when he finds sublimity
mixed up with absurdity, it almost makes
him angry. One of the oddest and oldest-looking
buildings in Quebec is a little one-story house
on St. Louis Street, to which poor General Montgomery
was taken after he was shot; and it is a
pastry-cook's now, and the tarts and cakes in the
window vexed Mr. Arbuton so much — not that
he seemed to care for Montgomery — that I did n't
dare to laugh.

I live very little in the nineteenth century at
present, and do not care much for people who do.
Still I have a few grains of affection left for Uncle
Jack, which I want you to give him.

I suppose it will take about six stamps to pay
this letter. I forgot to say that Dick goes to be
barbered every day at the “Montcalm Shaving
and Shampooing Saloon,” so called because they
say Montcalm held his last council of war there.
It is a queer little steep-roofed house, with a flowering
bean up the front, and a bit of garden, full
of snap-dragons, before it.

We shall be here a week or so yet, at any rate,
and then, I think, we shall go straight home, Dick
has lost so much time already.