University of Virginia Library

8. VIII.
THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL.

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 195. In-line Illustration. Image of an old man all in black with keys in his hand.]

The feeling
of foreign
travel for
which our tourists
had striven
throughout
their journey,
and which
they had
known in
some degree
at Kingston
and all the
way down the
river, was intensified
from
the first moment
in Montreal;
and it
was so welcome that they were almost glad to lose
money on their greenbacks, which the conductor of
the omnibus would take only at a discount of
twenty cents. At breakfast next morning they

could hardly tell on what country they had fallen.
The waiters had but a thin varnish of English
speech upon their native French, and they spoke
their own tongue with each other; but most of the
meats were cooked to the English taste, and the
whole was a poor imitation of an American hotel.
During their stay the same commingling of usages
and races bewildered them; the shops were English
and the clerks were commonly French; the carriage-drivers
were often Irish, and up and down
the streets with their pious old-fashioned names,
tinkled American horse-cars. Everywhere were
churches and convents that recalled the ecclesiastical
and feudal origin of the city; the great tabular
bridge, the superb water-front with its long
array of docks only surpassed by those of Liverpool,
the solid blocks of business houses, and the
substantial mansions on the quieter streets, proclaimed
the succession of Protestant thrift and
energy.

Our friends cared far less for the modern splendor
of Montreal than for the remnants of its past, and
for the features that identified it with another faith
and another people than their own. Isabel would
almost have confessed to any one of the black-robed
priests upon the street; Basil could easily have
gone down upon his knees to the white-hooded,
pale-faced nuns gliding among the crowd. It was
rapture to take a carriage, and drive, not to the
cemetery, not to the public library, not to the

rooms of the Young Men's Christian Association, or
the grain elevators, or the new park just tricked out
with rockwork and sprigs of evergreen, — not to
any of the charming resorts of our own cities, but as
in Europe to the churches, the churches of a pitiless
superstition, the churches with their atrocious pictures
and statues, their lingering smell of the morning's
incense, their confessionals, their fee-taking
sacristans, their worshippers dropped here and there
upon their knees about the aisles and saying their
prayers with shut or wandering eyes according as
they were old women or young! I do not defend
the feeble sentimentality, — call it wickedness if
you like, — but I understand it, and I forgive it
from my soul.

They went first, of course, to the French cathedral,
pausing on their way to alight and walk through
the Bonsecours Market, where the habitans have all
come in their carts, with their various stores of poultry,
fruit, and vegetables, and where every cart is a
study. Here is a simple-faced young peasant-couple
with butter and eggs and chickens ravishingly
displayed; here is a smooth-cheeked, black-eyed,
black-haired young girl, looking as if an infusion
of Indian blood had darkened the red of her
cheeks, presiding over a stock of onions, potatoes,
beets, and turnips; there an old woman with a face
carven like a walnut, behind a flattering array of
cherries and pears; yonder a whole family trafficking
in loaves of brown-bread and maple-sugar in

many shapes of pious and grotesque device. There
are gay shows of bright scarfs and kerchiefs and
vari-colored yarns, and sad shows of old clothes and
second-hand merchandise of other sorts; but above
all prevails the abundance of orchard and garden,
while within the fine edifice are the stalls of the
butchers, and in the basement below a world of
household utensils, glass-ware, hard-ware, and
wooden-ware. As in other Latin countries, each
peasant has given a personal interest to his wares,
but the bargains are not clamored over as in Latin
lands abroad. Whatever protest and concession
and invocation of the saints attend the transaction
of business at Bonsecours Market are in a subdued
tone. The fat huckster-women drowsing beside
their wares, scarce send their voices beyond the
borders of their broad-brimmed straw hats, as they
softly haggle with purchasers, or tranquilly gossip
together.

At the cathedral there are, perhaps, the worst
paintings in the world, and the massive pine-board
pillars are unscrupulously smoked to look like marble;
but our tourists enjoyed it as if it had been
St. Peter's; in fact it has something of the barn-like
immensity and impressiveness of St. Peter's.
They did not ask it to be beautiful or grand; they
desired it only to recall the beloved ugliness, the
fondly cherished hideousness and incongruity of
the average Catholic churches of their remembrance,
and it did this and more: it added an effect

of its own; it offered the spectacle of a swarthy old
Indian kneeling before the high altar, telling his
beads, and saying with many sighs and tears the
prayers which it cost so much martyrdom and heroism
to teach his race. “O, it is only a savage
man,” said the little French boy who was showing
them the place, impatient of their interest in a
thing so unworthy as this groaning barbarian. He
ran swiftly about from object to object, rapidly lecturing
their inattention. “It is now time to go
up into the tower,” said he, and they gladly made
that toilsome ascent, though it is doubtful if the ascent
of towers is not too much like the ascent of
mountains ever to be compensatory. From the top
of Notre Dame is certainly to be had a prospect
upon which, but for his fluttered nerves and trembling
muscles and troubled respiration, the traveller
might well look with delight, and as it is must behold
with wonder. So far as the eye reaches it
dwells only upon what is magnificent. All the features
of that landscape are grand. Below you
spreads the city, which has less that is merely mean
in it than any other city of our continent, and which
is everywhere ennobled by stately civic edifices,
adorned by tasteful churches, and skirted by full-foliaged
avenues of mansions and villas. Behind it
rises the beautiful mountain, green with woods and
gardens to its crest, and flanked on the east by an
endless fertile plain, and on the west by another
expanse, through which the Ottawa rushes, turbid
and dark, to its confluence with the St. Lawrence.
Then these two mighty streams commingled flow
past the city, lighting up the vast champaign country
to the south, while upon the utmost southern
verge, as on the northern, rise the cloudy summits
of far-off mountains.

As our travellers gazed upon all this grandeur,
their hearts were humbled to the tacit admission
that the colonial metropolis was not only worthy of
its seat, but had traits of a solid prosperity not excelled
by any of the abounding and boastful cities
of the Republic. Long before they quitted Montreal
they had rallied from this weakness, but they
delighted still to honor her superb beauty.

The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top with
the names of those who have climbed it, and most
of these are Americans, who flock in great numbers
to Canada in summer. They modify its hotel life,
and the objects of interest thrive upon their bounty.
Our friends met them at every turn, and knew them
at a glance from the native populations, who are
also easily distinguishable from each other. The
French Canadians are nearly always of a peasant-like
commonness, or where they rise above this
have a bourgeois commonness of face and manner;
and the English Canadians are to be known from
the many English sojourners by the effort to look
much more English than the latter. The social
heart of the colony clings fast to the mother-country,
that is plain, whatever the political tendency

may be; and the public monuments and inscriptions
celebrate this affectionate union.

At the English cathedral the effect is deepened
by the epitaphs of those whose lives were passed in
the joint service of England and her loyal child;
and our travellers, whatever their want of sympathy
with the sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty
in that attitude of proud reverence. Here, at least,
was a people not cut off from its past, but holding,
unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist for
us only in history. It gave a glamour of olden
time to the new land; it touched the prosaic democratic
present with the waning poetic light of the
aristocratic and monarchical tradition. There was
here and there a title on the tablets, and there was
everywhere the formal language of loyalty and of
veneration for things we have tumbled into the
dust. It is a beautiful church, of admirable English
Gothic; if you are so happy, you are rather curtly
told you may enter by a burly English figure in
some kind of sombre ecclesiastical drapery, and
within its quiet precincts you may feel yourself in
England if you like, — which, for my part, I do not.
Neither did our friends enjoy it so much as the
Church of the Jesuits, with its more than tolerable
painting, its coldly frescoed ceiling, its architectural
taste of subdued Renaissance, and its black-eyed
peasant-girl telling her beads before a side altar,
just as in the enviably deplorable countries we all
love; nor so much even as the Irish cathedral which

they next visited. That is a very gorgeous cathedral
indeed, painted and gilded à merveille, and
everywhere stuck about with big and little saints
and crucifixes, and pictures incredibly bad — but
for those in the French cathedral. There is, of
course, a series representing Christ's progress to
Calvary; and there was a very tattered old man,
— an old man whose voice had been long ago
drowned in whiskey, and who now spoke in a
ghostly whisper, — who, when he saw Basil's eye
fall upon the series, made him go the round of
them, and tediously explained them.

“Why did you let that old wretch bore you, and
then pay him for it?” Isabel asked.

“O, it reminded me so sweetly of the swindles
of other lands and days, that I couldn't help it,”
he answered; and straightway in the eyes of both
that poor, whiskeyfied, Irish tatterdemalion stood
transfigured to the glorious likeness of an Italian
beggar.

They were always doing something of this kind,
those absurdly sentimental people, whom yet I cannot
find it in my heart to blame for their folly,
though I could name ever so many reasons for rebuking
it. Why, in fact, should we wish to find
America like Europe? Are the ruins and impostures
and miseries and superstitions which beset
the traveller abroad so precious, that he should
desire to imagine them at every step in his own
hemisphere? Or have we then of our own no effestive

shapes of ignorance and want and incredibility,
that we must forever seek an alien contrast
to our native intelligence and comfort? Some
such questions this guilty couple put to each other,
and then drove off to visit the convent of the Gray
Nuns with a joyful expectation which I suppose the
prospect of the finest public-school exhibition in
Boston could never have inspired. But, indeed,
since there must be Gray Nuns, is it not well that
there are sentimentalists to take a mournful pleasure
in their sad, pallid existence?

The convent is at a good distance from the Irish
cathedral, and in going to it the tourists made
their driver carry them through one of the few
old French streets which still remain in Montreal.
Fires and improvements had made havoc among
the quaint houses since Basil's first visit; but at
last they came upon a narrow, ancient Rue Saint
Antoine, — or whatever other saint it was called
after, — in which there was no English face or
house to be seen. The doors of the little one-story
dwellings opened from the pavement, and within
you saw fat madame the mother moving about her
domestic affairs, and spare monsieur the elderly
husband smoking beside the open window; French
babies crawled about the tidy floors; French martyrs
(let us believe Lalement or Brébeuf, who gave
up their heroic lives for the conversion of Canada)
lifted their eyes in high-colored lithographs on the
wall; among the flower-pots in the dormer-window

looking from every tin roof sat and sewed a smooth-haired
young girl, I hope, — the romance of each
little mansion. The antique and foreign character
of the place was accented by the inscription upon a
wall of “Sirop adoucissant de Madame Winslow.”

Ever since 1692 the Gray Nuns have made a
refuge within the ample borders of their convent
for infirm old people and for foundling children,
and it is now in the regular course of sight-seeing
for the traveller to visit their hospital at noonday,
when he beholds the Sisters at their devotions in
the chapel. It is a bare, white-walled, cold-looking
chapel, with the usual paraphernalia of pictures
and crucifixes. Seated upon low benches on either
side of the aisle were the curious or the devout;
the former in greater number and chiefly Americans,
who were now and then whispered silent by
an old pauper zealous for the sanctity of the place.
At the stroke of twelve the Sisters entered two by
two, followed by the lady-superior with a prayerbook
in her hand. She clapped the leaves of this
together in signal for them to kneel, to rise, to
kneel again and rise, while they repeated in rather
harsh voices their prayers, and then clattered out
of the chapel as they had clattered in, with resounding
shoes. The two young girls at the head
were very pretty, and all the pale faces had a
corpse-like peace. As Basil looked at their pensive
sameness, it seemed to him that those prettiest
girls might very well be the twain that he had seen

there so many years ago, stricken forever young in
their joyless beauty. The ungraceful gowns of
coarse gray, the blue checked aprons, the black
crape caps, were the same; they came and went
with the same quick tread, touching their brows
with holy water and kneeling and rising now as
then with the same constrained and ordered movements.
Would it be too cruel if they were really
the same persons? or would it be yet more cruel if
every year two girls so young and fair were self-doomed
to renew the likeness of that youthful
death?

The visitors went about the hospital, and saw
the old men and the little children to whom these
good pure lives were given, and they could only
blame the system, not the instruments or their
work. Perhaps they did not judge wisely of the
amount of self-sacrifice involved, for they judged
from hearts to which love was the whole of earth
and heaven; but nevertheless they pitied the Gray
Nuns amidst the unhomelike comfort of their convent,
the unnatural care of those alien little ones.
Poor Sœurs Grises! in their narrow cells; at the
bedside of sickness and age and sorrow; kneeling
with clasped hands and yearning eyes before the
bloody spectacle of the cross! — the power of your
Church is shown far more subtly and mightily in
such as you, than in her grandest fanes or the sight
of her most august ceremonies, with praying priests,
swinging censers, tapers and pictures and images,

under a gloomy heaven of cathedral arches. There,
indeed, the faithful have given their substance;
but here the nun has given up the most precious
part of her woman's nature, and all the tenderness
that clings about the thought of wife and mother.

“There are some things that always greatly
afflict me in the idea of a new country,” said Basil,
as they loitered slowly through the grounds of the
convent toward the gate. “Of course, it 's absurd
to think of men as other than men, as having
changed their natures with their skies; but a new
land always does seem at first thoughts like a new
chance afforded the race for goodness and happiness,
for health and life. So I grieve for the earliest
dead at Plymouth more than for the multitude
that the plague swept away in London; I shudder
over the crime of the first guilty man, the sin of
the first wicked woman in a new country; the
trouble of the first youth or maiden crossed in love
there is intolerable. All should be hope and freedom
and prosperous life upon that virgin soil. It
never was so since Eden; but none the less I feel
it ought to be; and I am oppressed by the thought
that among the earliest walls which rose upon this
broad meadow of Montreal were those built to immure
the innocence of such young girls as these,
and shut them from the life we find so fair.
Wouldn't you like to know who was the first that
took the veil in this wild new country? Who was
she, poor soul, and what was her deep sorrow or

lofty rapture? You can fancy her some Indian
maiden lured to the renunciation by the splendor
of symbols and promises seen vaguely through the
lingering mists of her native superstitions; or some
weary soul, sick from the vanities and vices, the
bloodshed and the tears of the Old World, and
eager for a silence profounder than that of the wilderness
into which she had fled. Well, the Church
knows and God. She was dust long ago.”

From time to time there had fallen little fitful
showers during the morning. Now as the wedding-journeyers
passed out of the convent gate the rain
dropped soft and thin, and the gray clouds that
floated through the sky so swiftly were as far-seen
Gray Sisters in flight for heaven.

“We shall have time for the drive round the
mountain before dinner,” said Basil, as they got
into their carriage again; and he was giving the
order to the driver, when Isabel asked how far it
was.

“Nine miles.”

“O, then we can't think of going with one horse.
You know,” she added, “that we always intended
to have two horses for going round the mountain.”

“No,” said Basil, not yet used to having his
decisions reached without his knowledge. “And I
don't see why we should. Everybody goes with
one. You don't suppose we're too heavy, do you?”

“I had a party from the States, ma'am, yesterday,”

interposed the driver; “two ladies, real heavy
ones, two gentlemen, weighin' two hundred apiece,
and a stout young man on the box with me.
You'd 'a' thought the horse was drawin' an empty
carriage, the way she darted along.”

“Then his horse must be perfectly worn out
to-day,” said Isabel, refusing to admit the poor
fellow directly even to the honors of a defeat. He
had proved too much, and was put out of court with
no hope of repairing his error.

“Why, it seems a pity,” whispered Basil, dispassionately,
“to turn this man adrift, when he had
a reasonable hope of being with us all day, and has
been so civil and obliging.”

“O yes, Basil, sentimentalize him, do! Why
don't you sentimentalize his helpless, overworked
horse? — all in a reek of perspiration.”

“Perspiration! Why, my dear, it 's the rain!”

“Well, rain or shine, darling, I don't want to go
round the mountain with one horse; and it 's very
unkind of you to insist now, when you've tacitly
promised me all along to take two.”

“Now, this is a little too much, Isabel. You
know we never mentioned the matter till this
moment.”

“It 's the same as a promise, your not saying you
wouldn't. But I don't ask you to keep your word.
I don't want to go round the mountain. I'd much
rather go to the hotel. I'm tired.”

“Very well, then, Isabel, I'll leave you at the
hotel.”

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 209. In-line Illustration. Image one of a woman looking down with her hand to her mouth. Second image is of an man sitting looking down with his arms crossed. ]

In a moment it had come, the first serious dispute
of their wedded life. It had come as all such
calamities come, from nothing, and it was on them

in full disaster ere they knew. Such a very little
while ago, there in the convent garden, their lives
had been drawn closer in sympathy than ever before;
and now that blessed time seemed ages since,
and they were further asunder than those who have
never been friends. “I thought,” bitterly mused
Isabel, “that he would have done anything for
me.” “Who could have dreamed that a woman of
her sense would be so unreasonable,” he wondered.
Both had tempers, as I know my dearest reader
has (if a lady), and neither would yield; and so,
presently, they could hardly tell how, for they were
aghast at it all, Isabel was alone in her room amidst
the ruins of her life, and Basil alone in the one-horse
carriage, trying to drive away from the wreck
of his happiness. All was over; the dream was
past; the charm was broken. The sweetness of
their love was turned to gall; whatever had pleased
them in their loving moods was loathsome now, and
the things they had praised a moment before were
hateful. In that baleful light, which seemed to
dwell upon all they ever said or did in mutual enjoyment,
how poor and stupid and empty looked their
wedding-journey! Basil spent five minutes in arraigning
his wife and convicting her of every folly
and fault. His soul was in a whirl, —
In the midst of his bitter and furious upbraidings
he found himself suddenly become her ardent advocate,
and ready to denounce her judge as a heartless
monster. “On our wedding journey, too!
Good heavens, what an incredible brute I am!”
Then he said, “What an ass I am!” And the
pathos of the case having yielded to its absurdity,
he was helpless. In five minutes more he was at
Isabel's side, the one-horse carriage driver dismissed
with a handsome pour-boire, and a pair of lusty
bays with a glittering barouche waiting at the door
below. He swiftly accounted for his presence, which
she seemed to find the most natural thing that could
be, and she met his surrender with the openness of
a heart that forgives but does not forget, if indeed
the most gracious art is the only one unknown to
the sex.

She rose with a smile from the ruins of her life,
amidst which she had heart-brokenly sat down with
all her things on. “I knew you'd come back,” she
said.

“So did I,” he answered. “I am much too good
and noble to sacrifice my preference to my duty.”

“I didn't care particularly for the two horses,
Basil,” she said, as they descended to the barouche.
“It was your refusing them that hurt me.”

“And I didn't want the one-horse carriage. It
was your insisting so that provoked me.”

“Do you think people ever quarreled before on
a wedding journey?” asked Isabel as they drove
gayly out of the city.

“Never! I can't conceive of it. I suppose if
this were written down, nobody would believe it.”

“No, nobody could,” said Isabel, musingly; and
she added after a pause, “I wish you would tell
me just what you thought of me, dearest. Did
you feel as you did when our little affair was
broken off, long ago? Did you hate me?”

“I did, most cordially; but not half so much as
I despised myself the next moment. As to its
being like a lover's quarrel, it wasn't. It was more
bitter; so much more love than lovers ever give
had to be taken back. Besides, it had no dignity,
and a lover's quarrel always has. A lover's quarrel
always springs from a more serious cause, and
has an air of romantic tragedy. This had no
grace of the kind. It was a poor shabby little
squabble.”

“O, don't call it so, Basil! I should like you to
respect even a quarrel of ours more than that. It
was tragical enough with me, for I didn't see how
it could ever be made up. I knew I couldn't make
the advances. I don't think it is quite feminine to
be the first to forgive, is it?”

“I'm sure I can't say. Perhaps it would be
rather unladylike.”

“Well, you see, dearest, what I am trying to get
at is this: whether we shall love each other the
more or the less for it. I think we shall get on
all the better for a while, on account of it. But I
should have said it was totally out of character.
It 's something you might have expected of a very
young bridal couple; but after what we've been
through, it seems too improbable.”

“Very well,” said Basil, who, having made all
the concessions, could not enjoy the quarrel as she
did, simply because it was theirs; “let 's behave as
if it had never been.”

“O no, we can't. To me, it 's as if we had just
won each other.”

In fact it gave a wonderful zest and freshness to
that ride round the mountain, and shed a beneficent
glow upon the rest of their journey. The sun came
out through the thin clouds, and lighted up the vast
plain that swept away north and east, with the
purple heights against the eastern sky. The royal
mountain lifted its graceful mass beside them, and
hid the city wholly from sight. Peasant-villages,
in the shade of beautiful elms, dotted the plain in
every direction, and at intervals crept up to the side
of the road along which they drove. But these had
been corrupted by a more ambitious architecture
since Basil saw them last, and were no longer purely
French in appearance. Then, nearly every house
was a tannery in a modest way, and poetically
published the fact by the display of a sheep's tail
over the front door, like a bush at a wine-shop.
Now, if the tanneries still existed, the poetry of the
sheeps' tails had vanished from the portals. But
our friends were consoled by meeting numbers of the
peasants jolting home from market in the painted
carts, which are doubtless of the pattern of the
carts first built there two hundred years ago. They
were grateful for the immortal old women, crooked

and brown with the labor of the fields, who abounded
in these vehicles; when a huge girl jumped from
the tail of her cart, and showed the thick, clumsy
ankles of a true peasant-maid, they could only sigh
out their unspeakable satisfaction.

Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cottages,
through the open doors of which they could
see the exquisite neatness of the life within. One
of the doors opened into a school-house, where they
beheld with rapture the school-mistress, book in
hand, and with a quaint cap on her gray head, and
encircled by her flock of little boys and girls.

By and by it began to rain again; and now
while their driver stopped to put up the top of the
barouche, they entered a country church which had
taken their fancy, and walked up the aisle with the
steps that blend with silence rather than break it,
while they heard only the soft whisper of the shower
without. There was no one there but themselves.
The urn of holy water seemed not to have been
troubled that day, and no penitent knelt at the
shrine, before which twinkled so faintly one lighted
lamp. The white roof swelled into dim arches
over their heads; the pale day like a visible hush
stole through the painted windows; they heard
themselves breathe as they crept from picture to
picture.

A narrow door opened at the side of the high
altar, and a slender young priest appeared in a
long black robe, and with shaven head. He, too,

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 215. In-line Illustration. Image of a young priest with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks.] as he moved with noiseless feet, seemed a part of
the silence; and when he approached with dreamy
black eyes fixed upon them, and bowed courteously,
it seemed impossible he should speak. But he
spoke, the pale young priest, the dark-robed tradition,
the tonsured vision of an age and a church
that are passing.

“Do you understand
French,
monsieur?”

“A very little,
monsieur.”

“A very little
is more than my
English,” he said,
yet he politely
went the round of
the pictures with
them, and gave
them the names of
the painters between
his crossings
at the different
altars. At the
high altar there
was a very fair
Crucifixion; before
this the priest bent one knee. “Fine picture,
fine altar, fine church,” he said in English. At
last they stopped near the poor-box. As their

coins clinked against those within, he smiled serenely
upon the good heretics. Then he bowed,
and, as if he had relapsed into the past, he vanished
through the narrow door by which he had
entered.

Basil and Isabel stood speechless a moment on
the church steps. Then she cried, —

“O, why didn't something happen?”

“Ah, my dear! what could have been half so
good as the nothing that did happen? Suppose
we knew him to have taken orders because of a disappointment
in love: how common it would have
made him; everybody has been crossed in love once
or twice.” He bade the driver take them back to
the hotel. “This is the very bouquet of adventure:
why should we care for the grosser body? I dare
say if we knew all about yonder pale young priest,
we should not think him half so interesting as we
do now.”

At dinner they spent the intervals of the courses
in guessing the nationality of the different persons,
and in wondering if the Canadians did not make it
a matter of conscientious loyalty to out-English the
English even in the matter of pale-ale and sherry,
and in rotundity of person and freshness of face,
just as they emulated them in the cut of their
clothes and whiskers. Must they found even their
health upon the health of the mother-country?

Our friends began to detect something servile in
it all, and but that they were such amiable persons,

the loyally perfect digestion of Montreal would have
gone far to impair their own.

The loyalty, which had already appeared to
them in the cathedral, suggested itself in many
ways upon the street, when they went out after
dinner to do that little shopping which Isabel had
planned to do in Montreal. The booksellers' windows
were full of Canadian editions of our authors,
and English copies of English works, instead of our
pirated editions; the dry-goods stores were gay
with fabries in the London taste and garments of
the London shape; here was the sign of a photographer
to the Queen, there of a hatter to H. R. H.
the Prince of Wales; a barber was “under the
patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, H. E.
the Duke of Cambridge, and the gentry of Montreal.”
Ich dien was the motto of a restaurateur;
a hosier had gallantly labeled his stock in trade
with Honi soit qui mal y pense. Again they noted
the English solidity of the civic edifices, and already
they had observed in the foreign population a difference
from that at home. They saw no German
faces on the streets, and the Irish faces had not that
truculence which they wear sometimes with us.
They had not lost their native simpleness and kindliness;
the Irishmen who drove the public carriages
were as civil as our own Boston hackmen, and behaved
as respectfully under the shadow of England
here, as they would have done under it in Ireland.
The problem which vexes us seems to have been

solved pleasantly enough in Canada. Is it because
the Celt cannot brook equality; and where he has
not an established and recognized caste above him,
longs to trample on those about him; and if he cannot
be lowest, will at least be highest?

However, our friends did not suffer this or any
other advantage of the colonial relation to divert
them from the opinion to which their observation
was gradually bringing them, — that its overweening
loyalty placed a great country like Canada in a
very silly attitude, the attitude of an overgrown,
unmanly boy, clinging to the maternal skirts, and
though spoilt and willful, without any character of
his own. The constant reference of local hopes to
that remote centre beyond seas, the test of success
by the criterions of a necessarily different civilization,
the social and intellectual dependence implied
by traits that meet the most hurried glance in
the Dominion, give an effect of meanness to the
whole fabric. Doubtless it is a life of comfort, of
peace, of irresponsibility they live there, but it lacks
the grandeur which no sum of material prosperity
can give; it is ignoble, like all voluntarily subordinate
things. Somehow, one feels that it has no
basis in the New World, and that till it is shaken
loose from England it cannot have.

It would be a pity, however, if it should be
parted from the parent country merely to be joined
to an unsympathetic half-brother like ourselves;
and nothing, fortunately, seems to be further from

the Canadian mind. There are some experiments
no longer possible to us which could still be tried
there to the advantage of civilization, and we were
better two great nations side by side than a union
of discordant traditions and ideas. But none the
less does the American traveller, swelling with forgetfulness
of the shabby despots who govern New
York, and the swindling railroad kings whose word
is law to the whole land, feel like saying to the
hulking young giant beyond St. Lawrence and the
Lakes, “Sever the apron-strings of allegiance, and
try to be yourself whatever you are.”

Something of this sort Basil said, though of
course not in apostrophic phrase, nor with Isabel's
entire concurrence, when he explained to her that
it was to the colonial dependence of Canada she
owed the ability to buy things so cheaply there.

The fact is that the ladies' parlor at the hotel
had been after dinner no better than a den of smugglers,
in which the fair contrabandists had debated
the best means of evading the laws of their country.
At heart every man is a smuggler, and how much
more every woman! She would have no scruple in
ruining the silk and woolen interest throughout the
United States. She is a free-trader by intuitive
perception of right, and is limited in practice by
nothing but fear of the statute. What could be
taken into the States without detection, was the
subject before that wicked conclave; and next,
what it would pay to buy in Canada. It seemed

that silk umbrellas were most eligible wares; and
in the display of such purchases the parlor was
given the appearance of a violent thunder-storm.
Gloves it was not advisable to get; they were better
at home, as were many kinds of fine woolen
goods. But laces, which you could carry about you,
were excellent; and so was any kind of silk. Could
it be carried if simply cut, and not made up? There
was a difference about this: the friend of one lady
had taken home half a trunkful of cut silks; the
friend of another had “run up the breadths” of one
lone little silk skirt, and them lost it by the rapacity
of the customs officers. It was pretty much luck,
and whether the officers happened to be in good-humor
or not. You must not try to take in anything
out of season, however. One had heard of a
Boston lady going home in July, who “had the furs
taken off her back,” in that inclement month. Best
get everything seasonable, and put it on at once.
“And then, you know, if they ask you, you can say
it 's been worn.” To this black wisdom came the
combined knowledge of those miscreants. Basil
could not repress a shudder at the innate depravity
of the female heart. Here were virgins nurtured in
the most spotless purity of life, here were virtuous
mothers of families, here were venerable matrons,
patterns in society and the church, — smugglers to
a woman, and eager for any guilty subterfuge! He
glanced at Isabel to see what effect the evil conversation
had upon her. Her eyes sparkled; her
cheeks glowed; all the woman was on fire for
smuggling. He sighed heavily and went out with
her to do the little shopping.

Shall I follow them upon their excursion?
Shopping in Montreal is very much what it is in
Boston or New York, I imagine, except that the
clerks have a more honeyed sweetness of manners
towards the ladies of our nation, and are surprisingly
generous constructionists of our revenue laws.
Isabel had profited by every word that she had
heard in the ladies' parlor, and she would not venture
upon unsafe ground; but her tender eyes
looked her unutterable longing to believe in the
charming possibilities that the clerks suggested.
She bemoaned herself before the corded silks, which
there was no time to have made up; the piece-velvets
and the linens smote her to the heart.
But they also stimulated her invention, and she
bought and bought of the made-up wares in real
or fancied needs, till Basil represented that neither
their purses nor their trunks could stand any more.
“O, don't be troubled about the trunks, dearest,”
she cried, with that gayety which nothing but
shopping can kindle in a woman's heart; while he
faltered on from counter to counter, wondering at
which he should finally swoon from fatigue. At
last, after she had declared repeatedly, “There,
now, I am done,” she briskly led the way back to
the hotel to pack up her purchases.

Basil parted with her at the door. He was a

man of high principle himself, and that scene in
the smugglers' den, and his wife's preparation for
transgression, were revelations for which nothing
could have consoled him but a paragon umbrella
for five dollars, and an excellent business suit of
Scotch goods for twenty.

When some hours later he sat with Isabel on the
forward promenade of the steamboat for Quebec,
and summed up the profits of their shopping, they
were both in the kindliest mood towards the poor
Canadians, who had built the admirable city before
them.

For miles the water front of Montreal is superbly
faced with quays and locks of solid stone masonry,
and thus she is clean and beautiful to the very feet.
Stately piles of architecture, instead of the foul old
tumble-down warehouses that dishonor the waterside
in most cities, rise from the broad wharves;
behind these spring the twin towers of Notre Dame,
and the steeples of the other churches above the
city roofs.

“It 's noble, yes, it 's noble, after the best that
Europe can show,” said Isabel, with enthusiasm;
“and what a pleasant day we've had here!
Doesn't even our quarrel show couleur de rose in
this light?”

“One side of it,” answered Basil, dreamily,
“but all the rest is black.”

“What do you mean, my dear?”

“Why, the Nelson Monument, with the sunset
on it, at the head of the street there.”

The effect was so fine that Isabel could not be
angry with him for failing to heed what she had
said, and she mused a moment with him.

“It seems rather far-fetched,” she said presently,
“to erect a monument to Nelson in Montreal,
doesn't it? But then, it 's a very absurd monument
when you're near it,” she added, thoughtfully.

Basil did not answer at once, for gazing on this
Nelson column in Jacques Cartier Square, his
thoughts wandered away, not to the hero of the
Nile, but to the doughty old Breton navigator, the
first white man who ever set foot upon that shore,
and who more than three hundred years ago
explored the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal, and
in the splendid autumn weather climbed to the top
of her green height and named it. The scene that
Jacques Cartier then beheld, like a mirage of the
past projected upon the present, floated before him,
and he saw at the mountain's foot the Indian city
of Hochelaga, with its vast and populous lodges of
bark, its encircling palisades, and its wide outlying
fields of yellow maize. He heard with Jacques
Cartier's sense the blare of his followers' trumpets
down in the open square of the barbarous city,
where the soldiers of many an Old-World fight,
“with mustached lip and bearded chin, with arquebuse
and glittering halberd, helmet, and cuirass,”
moved among the plumed and painted savages;
then he lifted Jacques Cartier's eyes, and looked

out upon the magnificent landscape. “East, west,
and north, the mantling forest was over all, and
the broad blue ribbon of the great river glistened
amid a realm of verdure. Beyond, to the bounds
of Mexico, stretched a leafy desert, and the vast
hive of industry, the mighty battle-ground of later
centuries, lay sunk in savage torpor, wrapped in
illimitable woods.”

A vaguer picture of Champlain, who, seeking
a westward route to China and the East, some
three quarters of a century later, had fixed the first
trading-post at Montreal, and camped upon the
spot where the convent of the Gray Nuns now
stands, appeared before him, and vanished with all
its fleets of fur-traders' boats and hunters' birch
canoes, and the watch-fires of both; and then in
the sweet light of the spring morning, he saw
Maisonneuve leaping ashore upon the green meadows,
that spread all gay with early flowers where
Hochelaga once stood, and with the black-robed
Jesuits, the high-born, delicately nurtured, and
devoted nuns, and the steel-clad soldiers of his train,
kneeling about the altar raised there in the wilderness,
and silent amidst the silence of nature at the
lifted Host.

He painted a semblance of all this for Isabel,
using the colors of the historian who has made
these scenes the beautiful inheritance of all dreamers,
and sketched the battles, the miracles, the sufferings,
and the penances through which the pious

colony was preserved and prospered, till they both
grew impatient of modern Montreal, and would
fain have had the ancient Villemarie back in its
place.

“Think of Maisonneuve, dearest, climbing in
midwinter to the top of the mountain there, under
a heavy cross set with the bones of saints, and
planting it on the summit, in fulfillment of a vow
to do so if Villemarie were saved from the freshet,
and then of Madame de la Peltrie romantically
receiving the sacrament there, while all Villemarie
fell down adoring! Ah, that was a picturesque
people! When did ever a Boston governor climb
to the top of Beacon hill in fulfillment of a vow?
To be sure, we may yet see a New York governor
doing something of the kind — if he can find a hill.
But this ridiculous column to Nelson, who never
had anything to do with Montreal,” he continued;
it really seems to me the perfect expression of snobbish
colonial dependence and sentimentality, seeking
always to identify itself with the mother-country,
and ignoring the local past and its heroic
figures. A column to Nelson in Jacques Cartier
Square, on the ground that was trodden by Champlain,
and won for its present masters by the death
of Wolfe!”

The boat departed on her trip to Quebec. During
supper they were served by French waiters,
who, without apparent English of their own, miraculously
understood that of the passengers, except

in the case of the furious gentleman who wanted
English breakfast tea; to so much English as that
their inspiration did not reach, and they forced him
to compromise on coffee. It was a French boat,
owned by a French company, and seemed to be
officered by Frenchmen throughout; certainly, as
our tourists in the joy of their good appetites
affirmed, the cook was of that culinarily delightful
nation.

The boat was almost as large as those of the
Hudson, but it was not so lavishly splendid, though
it had everything that could minister to the comfort
and self-respect of the passengers. These were of
all nations, but chiefly Americans, with some
French Canadians. The former gathered on the
forward promenade, enjoying what little of the
landscape the growing night left visible, and the
latter made society after their manner in the saloon.
They were plain-looking men and women,
mostly, and provincial, it was evident, to their inmost
hearts; provincial in origin, provincial by inheritance,
by all their circumstances, social and
political. Their relation with France was not a
proud one, but it was not like submersion by the
slip-slop of English colonial loyalty; yet they seem
to be troubled by no memories of their hundred
years' dominion of the land that they rescued from
the wilderness, and that was wrested from them by
war. It is a strange fate for any people thus to
have been cut off from the parent-country, and

abandoned to whatever destiny their conquerors
chose to reserve for them; and if each of the race
wore the sadness and strangeness of that fate in his
countenance it would not be wonderful. Perhaps it
is wonderful that none of them shows anything of
the kind. In their desertion they have multiplied
and prospered; they may have a national grief, but
they hide it well; and probably they have none.

Later, one of them appeared to Isabel in the person
of the pale, slender young ecclesiastic who had
shown her and Basil the pictures in the country
church. She was confessing to the priest, and she
was not at all surprised to find that he was Basil
in a suit of mediæval armor. He had an immense
cross on his shoulder.

“To get this cross to the top of the mountain,”
thought Isabel, “we must have two horses. Basil,”
she added, aloud, “we must have two horses!”

“Ten, if you like, my dear,” answered his voice,
cheerfully, “though I think we'd better ride up in
the omnibus.”

She opened her eyes, and saw him smiling.
“We're in sight of Quebec,” he said. “Come
out as soon as you can, — come out into the seventeenth
century.”