University of Virginia Library

9. IX.
QUEBEC.

Isabel hurried
out upon the forward
promenade,
where all the
other passengers
seemed to be assembled,
and beheld
a vast bulk
of gray and purple
rock, swelling
two hundred
feet up from the
mists of the
river, and taking
the early morning
light warm
upon its face and
crown. Black-hulked, red-chimneyed Liverpool
steamers, gay river-craft and ships of every sail and
flag, filled the stream athwart which the ferries
sped their swift traffic-laden shuttles; a lower town
clung to the foot of the rock, and crept, populous
and picturesque, up its sides; from the massive citadel

on its crest flew the red banner of Saint
George, and along its brow swept the gray wall of
the famous, heroic, beautiful city, overtopped by
many a gleaming spire and antique roof.

Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, modern
world the vessel steamed up to this city of an
olden time and another ideal, — to her who was a
lady from the first, devout and proud and strong,
and who still, after two hundred and fifty years,
keeps perfect the image and memory of the feudal
past from which she sprung. Upon her height she
sits unique; and when you say Quebec, having
once beheld her, you invoke a sense of mediæval
strangeness and of beauty which the name of no
other city could intensify.

As they drew near the steamboat wharf they
saw, swarming over a broad square, a market beside
which the Bonsecours Market would have
shown as common as the Quincy, and up the odd
wooden - side-walked
street
stretched an
aisle of carriages
and
those high
swung calashes,
which are
to Quebec
what the gondolas
are to

Venice. But the hand of destiny was upon our
tourists, and they rode up town in an omnibus.
They were going to the dear old Hotel Musty in
— Street, wanting which Quebec is not to be
thought of without a pang. It is now closed, and
Prescott Gate, through which they drove into the
Upper Town, has been demolished since the summer
of last year. Swiftly whirled along the steep
winding road, by those Quebec horses which expect
to gallop up hill whatever they do going down,
they turned a corner of the towering weed-grown
rock, and shot in under the low arch of the gate,
pierced with smaller doorways for the foot-passengers.
The gloomy masonry dripped with damp,
the doors were thickly studded with heavy iron
spikes; old cannon, thrust endwise into the ground
at the sides of the gate, protected it against passing
wheels. Why did not some semi-forbidding
commissary of police, struggling hard to overcome
his native politeness, appear and demand their passports?
The illusion was otherwise perfect, and it
needed but this touch. How often in the adored
Old World, which we so love and disapprove, had
they driven in through such gates at that morning
hour! On what perverse pretext, then, was it not
some ancient town of Normandy?

“Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and
they'd soon rattle this old wall down and let in a
little fresh air!” said a patriotic voice at Isabel's
elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow,

irregular streets, the huddling gables, the quaint
roofs, through which and under which they drove
on to the hotel.

As they dashed into a broad open square, “Here
is the French Cathedral; there is the Upper Town
Market; yonder are the Jesuit Barracks!” cried
Basil; and they had a passing glimpse of gray
stone towers at one side of the square, and a low,
massive yellow building at the other, and, between
the two, long ranks of carts, and fruit and vegetable
stands, protected by canvas awnings and broad
umbrellas. Then they dashed round the corner of
a street, and drew up before the hotel door. The
low ceilings, the thick walls, the clumsy wood-work,
the wandering corridors, gave the hotel all the desired
character of age, and its slovenly state bestowed
an additional charm. In another place they
might have demanded neatness, but in Quebec they
would almost have resented it. By a chance they
had the best room in the house, but they held it
only till certain people who had engaged it by telegraph
should arrive in the hourly expected steamer
from Liverpool; and, moreover, the best room at
Hotel Musty was consolingly bad. The house
was very full, and the Ellisons (who had come on
with them from Montreal) were bestowed in less
state only on like conditions.

The travellers all met at breakfast, which was
admirably cooked, and well served, with the attendance
of those swarms of flies which infest Quebec,

and especially infested the old Musty House, in
summer. It had, of course, the attraction of broiled
salmon, upon which the traveller breakfasts every
day as long as he remains in Lower Canada; and
it represented the abundance of wild berries in the
Quebec market; and it was otherwise a breakfast
worthy of the appetites that honored it.

There were not many other Americans besides
themselves at this hotel, which seemed, indeed, to
be kept open to oblige such travellers as had been
there before, and could not persuade themselves to
try the new Hotel St. Louis, whither the vastly
greater number resorted. Most of the faces our
tourists saw were English or English-Canadian, and
the young people from Omaha, who had got here
by some chance, were scarcely in harmony with the
place. They appeared to be a bridal party, but
which of the two sisters, in buff linen clad from
head to foot, was the bride, never became known.
Both were equally free with the husband, and he
was impartially fond of both: it was quite a family
affair.

For a moment Isabel harbored the desire to see
the city in company with Miss Ellison; but it was
only a passing weakness. She remembered directly
the coolness between friends which she had seen
caused by objects of interest in Europe, and she
wisely deferred a more intimate acquaintance till it
could have a purely social basis. After all, nothing
is so tiresome as continual exchange of sympathy,

or so apt to end in mutual dislike, — except gratitude.
So the ladies parted friends till dinner, and
drove off in separate carriages.

As in other show cities, there is a routine at
Quebec for travellers who come on Saturday and go
on Monday, and few depart from it. Our friends
necessarily, therefore, drove first to the citadel. It
was raining one of those cold rains by which the
scarce-banished winter reminds the Canadian fields
of his nearness even in midsummer, though between
the bitter showers the air was sultry and close;
and it was just the light in which to see the grim
strength of the fortress next strongest to Gibraltar
in the world. They passed a heavy iron gateway,
and up through a winding lane of masonry to the
gate of the citadel, where they were delivered into
the care of Private Joseph Drakes, who was to
show them such parts of the place as are open to
curiosity. But, a citadel which has never stood a
siege, or been threatened by any danger more serious
than Fenianism, soon becomes, however strong,
but a dull piece of masonry to the civilian; and our
tourists more rejoiced in the crumbling fragment of
the old French wall which the English destroyed
than in all they had built; and they valued the latter
work chiefly for the glorious prospects of the
St. Lawrence and its mighty valleys which it commanded.
Advanced into the centre of an amphitheatre
inconceivably vast, that enormous beak of
rock overlooks the narrow angle of the river, and

then, in every direction, immeasurable stretches of
gardened vale, and wooded upland, till all melts
into the purple of the encircling mountains. Far
and near are lovely white villages nestling under
elms, in the heart of fields and meadows; and
everywhere the long, narrow, accurately divided
farms stretch downward to the river-shores. The
best roads on the continent make this beauty and
richness accessible; each little village boasts some
natural wonder in stream, or lake, or cataract: and
this landscape, magnificent beyond any in eastern
America, is historical and interesting beyond
all others. Hither came Jacques Cartier three
hundred and fifty years ago, and wintered on the
low point there by the St. Charles; here, nearly a
century after, but still fourteen years before the
landing at Plymouth, Champlain founded the missionary
city of Quebec; round this rocky beak came
sailing the half-piratical armament of the Calvinist
Kirks in 1629, and seized Quebec in the interest of
the English, holding it three years; in the Lower
Town, yonder, first landed the coldly welcomed
Jesuits, who came with the returning French and
made Quebec forever eloquent of their zeal, their
guile, their heroism; at the foot of this rock lay
the fleet of Sir William Phipps, governor of Massachusetts,
and vainly assailed it in 1698; in 1759
came Wolfe and embattled all the region, on river
and land, till at last the bravely defended city fell
into his dying hand on the Plains of Abraham;
here Montgomery laid down his life at the head of
the boldest and most hopeless effort of our War of
Independence.

Private Joseph Drakes, with the generosity of an
enemy expecting drink-money, pointed out the sign-board
on the face of the crag commemorating
Montgomery's death; and then showed them the
officers' quarters and those of the common soldiers,
not far from which was a line of hang-dog fellows
drawn up to receive sentence for divers small misdemeanors,
from an officer whose blond whiskers
drooped Dundrearily from his fresh English cheeks.
There was that immense difference between him and
the men in physical grandeur and beauty, which is
so notable in the aristocratically ordered military
services of Europe, and which makes the rank seem
of another race from the file. Private Drakes
saluted his superior, and visibly deteriorated in his
presence, though his breast was covered with medals,
and he had fought England's battles in every part
of the world. It was a gross injustice, the triumph
of a thousand years of wrong; and it was touching
to have Private Drakes say that he expected in three
months to begin life for himself, after twenty years'
service of the Queen; and did they think he could
get anything to do in the States? He scarcely
knew what he was fit for, but he thought — to so
little in him came the victories he had helped to
win in the Crimea, in China, and in India — that
he could take care of a gentleman's horse and work

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 236. In-line Illustration. Image of a soldier and his family. His wife is modestly dressed and holding a small baby. Three other young children stand between their parents. All of the children are somewhat raggedly dressed. The entire family is smiling.] about his place. He looked inquiringly at Basil, as
if he might be a gentleman with a horse to be taken
care of and a place to be worked about, and made
him regret that he was not a man of substance
enough to provide for Private Drakes and Mrs.
Drakes and the brood of Ducklings, who had been
shown to him stowed away in one of those cavernous
rooms in the earthworks where the married soldiers
have their quarters. His regret enriched the reward
of Private Drakes' service, — which perhaps
answered one of Private Drakes' purposes, if not
his chief aim. He promised to come to the States
upon the pressing advice of Isabel, who, speaking
from her own large experience, declared that everybody
got on there; and he bade our friends an
affectionate farewell as they drove away to the
Plains of Abraham.

The fashionable surburban cottages and places of
Quebec are on the St. Louis Road leading northward
to the old battle-ground and beyond it; but
these face chiefly towards the rivers St. Lawence
and St. Charles, and lofty hedges and shrubbery
hide them in an English seclusion from the highway;
so that the visitor may uninterruptedly meditate
whatever emotion he will for the scene of
Wolfe's death as he rides along. His loftiest emotion
will want the noble height of that heroic soul, who
must always stand forth in history a figure of beautiful
and singular distinction, admirable alike for the
sensibility and daring, the poetic pensiveness, and
the martial ardor that mingled in him and taxed
his feeble frame with tasks greater than it could
bear. The whole story of the capture of Quebec is
full of romantic splendor and pathos. Her fall
was a triumph for all the English-speaking race,
and to us Americans, long scourged by the cruel
Indian wars plotted within her walls or sustained
by her strength, such a blessing as was hailed with
ringing bells and blazing bonfires throughout the
Colonies; yet now we cannot think without pity of
the hopes extinguished and the labors brought to
naught in her overthrow. That strange colony of
priests and soldiers, of martyrs and heroes, of which
she was the capital, willing to perish for an allegiance
to which the mother-country was indifferent,

and fighting against the armies with which England
was prepared to outnumber the whole Canadian
population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm
laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less
affecting than Wolfe dying to win her. The heart
opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of
his costly victory, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,”
which he would “rather have written than
beat the French to-morrow;” but it aches for the
defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered,
when told how brief his time was, “So much the
better; then I shall not live to see the surrender of
Quebec.”

In the city for which they perished their fame
has never been divided. The English have shown
themselves very generous victors; perhaps nothing
could be alleged against them, but that they were
victors. A shaft common to Wolfe and Montcalm
celebrates them both in the Governor's Garden;
and in the Chapel of the Ursuline Convent a tablet
is placed, where Montcalm died, by the same conquerors
who raised to Wolfe's memory the column
on the battle-field.

A dismal prison covers the ground where the
hero fell, and the monument stands on the spot
where Wolfe breathed his last, on ground lower
than the rest of the field; the friendly hollow that
sheltered him from the fire of the French dwarfs his
monument; yet it is sufficient, and the simple inscription,
“Here died Wolfe victorious,” gives it a

dignity which many cubits of added stature could
not bestow. Another of those bitter showers,
which had interspersed the morning's sunshine,
drove suddenly across the open plain, and our tourists
comfortably sentimentalized the scene behind
the close-drawn curtains of their carriage. Here a
whole empire had been lost and won, Basil reminded
Isabel; and she said, “Only think of it!” and
looked to a wandering fold of her skirt, upon which
the rain beat through a rent of the curtain.

Do I pitch the pipe too low? We poor honest
men are at a sad disadvantage; and now and then
I am minded to give a loose to fancy, and attribute
something really grand and fine to my people, in
order to make them worthier the reader's respected
acquaintance. But again, I forbid myself in a
higher interest; and I am afraid that even if I were
less virtuous, I could not exalt their mood upon a
battle-field; for of all things of the past a battle
is the least conceivable. I have heard men who
fought in many battles say that the recollection was
like a dream to them; and what can the merely
civilian imagination do on the Plains of Abraham,
with the fact that there, more than a century ago,
certain thousands of Frenchmen marched out, on a
bright September morning, to kill and maim as
many Englishmen? This ground, so green and
soft with grass beneath the feet, was it once torn
with shot and soaked with the blood of men? Did
they lie here in ranks and heaps, the miserable

slain, for whom tender hearts away yonder over the
sea were to ache and break? Did the wretches
that fell wounded stretch themselves here, and
writhe beneath the feet of friend and foe, or crawl
away for shelter into little hollows, and behind
bushes and fallen trees! Did he, whose soul was so
full of noble and sublime impulses, die here, shot
through like some ravening beast? The loathsome
carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din of arms, the
cries of victory, — I vainly strive to conjure up
some image of it all now; and God be thanked,
horrible spectre! that, fill the world with sorrow as
thou wilt, thou still remainest incredible in its
moments of sanity and peace. Least credible art
thou on the old battle-fields, where the mother
of the race denies thee with breeze and sun and
leaf and bird, and every blade of grass! The
red stain in Basil's thought yielded to the rain
sweeping across the pasture-land from which it had
long since faded, and the words on the monument,
“Here died Wolfe victorious,” did not proclaim his
bloody triumph over the French, but his self-conquest,
his victory over fear and pain and love of life.
Alas! when shall the poor, blind, stupid world honor
those who renounce self in the joy of their kind,
equally with those who devote themselves through
the anguish and loss of thousands? So old a world,
and groping still!

The tourists were better fitted for the next occasion
of sentiment, which was at the Hôtel Dieu,

whither they went after returning from the battle-field.
It took all the mal-address of which travellers
are masters to secure admittance, and it
was not till they had rung various wrong bells,
and misunderstood many soft nun-voices speaking
French through grated doors, and set divers sympathetic
spectators doing ineffectual services, that
they at last found the proper entrance, and were
answered in English that the porter would ask if
they might see the chapel. They hoped to find
there the skull of Brébeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs
who perished long ago for the conversion of a
race that has perished, and whose relics they had
come, fresh from their reading of parkman, with
some vague and patronizing intention to revere.
An elderly sister with a pale, kind face led them
through a ward of the hospital into the chapel,
which they found in the expected taste, and exquisitely
neat and cool, but lacking the martyr's
skull. They asked if it were not to be seen.
“Ah, yes, poor Père Brébeuf!” sighed the gentle
sister, with the tone and manner of having lost him
yesterday; “we had it down only last week, showing
it to some Jesuit fathers; but it 's in the convent
now, and isn't to be seen.” And there mingled
apparently in her regret for Père Brébeuf a
confusing sense of his actual state as a portable
piece of furniture. She would not let them praise
the chapel. It was very clean, yes, but there was
nothing to see in it. She deprecated their compliments
with many shrugs, but she was pleased; for
when we renounce the pomps and vanities of this
world, we are pretty sure to find them in some
other, — if we are women. She, good and pure
soul, whose whole life was given to self-denying
toil, had yet something angelically coquettish in
her manner, a spiritual-worldliness which was the
clarified likeness of this-worldliness. O, had they
seen the Hôtel Dieu at Montreal? Then (with a
vivacious wave of the hands) they would not care
to look at this, which by comparison was nothing.
Yet she invited them to go through the wards if
they would, and was clearly proud to have them
see the wonderful cleanness and comfort of the
place. There were not many patients, but here
and there a wan or fevered face looked at them
from its pillow, or a weak form drooped beside a
bed, or a group of convalescents softly talked together.
They came presently to the last hall, at
the end of which sat another nun, beside a window
that gave a view of the busy port, and beyond
it the landscape of village-lit plain and forest-darkened
height. On a table at her elbow stood a
rose-tree, on which hung two only pale tea-roses,
so fair, so perfect, that Isabel cried out in wonder
and praise. Ere she could prevent it, the nun, to
whom there had been some sort of presentation,
gathered one of the roses, and with a shy grace
offered it to Isabel, who shrank back a little as
from too costly a gift. “Take it,” said the first
[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 243. In-line Illustration. Image of a woman taking a flower from a nun.] nun, with her pretty French accent; while the
other, who spoke no English at all, beamed a
placid smile; and Isabel took it. The flower, lying
light in her palm, exhaled a delicate odor, and
a thrill of exquisite compassion for it trembled
through her heart, as if it had been the white,
cloistered life of the silent nun: with its pallid
loveliness, it was as a flower that had taken the
veil. It could never have uttered the burning
passion of a lover for his mistress; the nightingale
could have found no thorn on it to press his aching
poet's heart against; but sick and weary eyes had
dwelt gratefully upon it; at most it might have
expressed, like a prayer, the nun's stainless love of
some favorite saint in paradise. Cold, and pale, and
sweet, — was it indeed only a flower, this cloistered
rose of the Hôtel Dieu?

“Breathe it,” said the gentle Gray Sister;
“sometimes the air of the hospital offends. Not
us, no; we are used; but you come from the outside.”
And she gave her rose for this humble use
as lovingly as she devoted herself to her lowly
cares.

“It is very little to see,” she said at the end;
“but if you are pleased, I am very glad. Good-by,
good-by!” She stood with her arms folded,
and watched them out of sight with her kind, coquettish
little smile, and then the mute, blank life
of the nun resumed her.

From Hôtel Dieu to Hotel Musty it was but a
step; both were in the same street; but our friends
fancied themselves to have come an immense distance
when they sat down at an early dinner, amidst
the clash of crockery and cutlery, and looked round
upon all the profane travelling world assembled.
Their regard presently fixed upon one company
which monopolized a whole table, and were defined
from the other diners by peculiarities as marked as
those of the Sœurs Grises themselves. There were
only two men among some eight or ten women;
one of the former had a bad amiable face, with

eyes full of a merry deviltry; the other, clean-shaven,
and dark, was demure and silent as a priest.
The ladies were of various types, but of one effect,
with large rolling eyes, and faces that somehow
regarded the beholder as from a distance, and with
an impartial feeling for him as for an element of
publicity. One of them, who caressed a lapdog
with one hand while she served herself with the
other, was, as she seemed to believe, a blonde; she
had pale blue eyes, and her hair was cut in front
so as to cover her forehead with a straggling sandy-colored
fringe. She had an English look, and three
or four others, with dark complexion and black,
unsteady eyes, and various abandon of back-hair,
looked like Cockney houris of Jewish blood; while
two of the lovely company were clearly of our own
nation, as was the young man with the reckless
laughing face. The ladies were dressed and jeweled
with a kind of broad effectiveness, which was
to the ordinary style of society what scene-painting
is to painting, and might have borne close inspection
no better. They seemed the best-humored
people in the world, and on the kindliest terms with
each other. The waiters shared their pleasant
mood, and served them affectionately, and were
now and then invited to join in the gay talk which
babbled on over dislocated aspirates, and filled the
air with a sentiment of vagabond enjoyment, of
the romantic freedom of violated convention, of
something Gil Blas-like, almost picaresque.

If they had needed explanation it would have
been given by the announcement in the office of
the hotel that a troupe of British blondes was then
appearing in Quebec for one week only.

After dinner they took possession of the parlor,
and while one strummed fitfully upon the ailing
hotel piano, the rest talked, and talked shop, of
course, as all of us do when several of a trade are
got together.

“W'at,” said the eldest of the dark-faced, black-haired
British blondes of Jewish race, — “w'at are
we going to give at Montrehal?”

“We're going to give `Pygmalion,' at Montrehal,”
answered the British blonde of American birth,
good-humoredly burlesquing the erring h of her sister.

“But we cahn't, you know,” said the lady with
the fringed forehead; “Hagnes is gone on to New
York, and there 's nobody to do Wenus.”

“Yes, you know,” demanded the first speaker
“oo 's to do Wenus?

“Bella 's to do Wenus,” said a third.

There was an outcry at this, and “'Ow ever
would she get herself up for Wenus?” and “W'at
a guy she'll look!” and “Nonsense! Bella 's too
'eavy for Wenus!” came from different lively critics;
and the debate threatened to become too intimate
for the public ear, when one of their gentlemen
came in and said, “Charley don't seem so
well this afternoon.” On this the chorus changed

its note, and at the proposal, “Poor Charley, let 's
go and cheer 'im hup a bit,” the whole good-tempered
company trooped out of the parlor together.

Our tourists meant to give the rest of the afternoon
to that sort of aimless wandering to and fro
about the streets which seizes a foreign city unawares,
and best develops its charm of strangeness.
So they went out and took their fill of Quebec
with appetites keen through long fasting from
the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Montreal,
and impartially rejoiced in the crooked
up-and-down hill streets; the thoroughly French
domestic architecture of a place that thus denied
having been English for a hundred years; the
porte-cocherès beside every house; the French
names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bell-pulls;
the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining
roofs of tin, and the universal dormer-windows;
the littleness of the private houses, and the greatness
of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents;
the breadths of weather-stained city wall,
and the shaggy cliff beneath; the batteries, with
their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of
masonry, and the red-coated sergeants flirting with
nursery-maids upon the carriages, while the children
tumbled about over the pyramids of shot and
shell; the sloping market-place before the cathedral,
where yet some remnant of the morning's
traffic lingered under canvas canopies, and where
Isabel bought a bouquet of marigolds and asters of

an old woman peasant enough to have sold it in any
market-place of Europe; the small, dark shops beyond
the quarter invaded by English retail trade;
the movement of all the strange figures of cleric
and lay and military life; the sound of a foreign
speech prevailing over the English; the encounter
of other tourists, the passage back and forth through
the different city gates; the public wooden stairways,
dropping flight after flight from the Upper
to the Lower Town; the bustle of the port, with
its commerce and shipping and seafaring life huddled
close in under the hill; the many desolate
streets of the Lower Town, as black and ruinous as
the last great fire left them; and the marshy meadows
beyond, memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of
Cartier and Montcalm.

They went to the chapel of the Seminary at
Laval University, and admired the Le Brun, and
the other paintings of less merit, but equal interest
through their suggestion of a whole dim religious
world of paintings; and then they spent half an
hour in the cathedral, not so much in looking at the
Crucifixion by Vandyck which is there, as in reveling
amid the familiar rococo splendors of the
temple. Every swaggering statue of a saint, every
rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those that on
the carven and gilded clouds above the high altar
float —

was precious to them; the sacristan dusting the
sacred properties with a feather brush, and giving
each shrine a business-like nod as he passed, was as
a long-lost brother; they had hearts of aggressive
tenderness for the young girls and old women who
stepped in for a half-hour's devotion, and for the
men with bourgeois or peasant faces, who stole a
moment from affairs and crops, and gave it to the
saints. There was nothing in the place that need
remind them of America, and its taste was exactly
that of a thousand other churches of the eighteenth
century. They could easily have believed themselves
in the farthest Catholic South, but for the
two great porcelain stoves that stood on either side
of the nave near the entrance, and that too vividly
reminded them of the possibility of cold.

In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and
other confusions of the South and North, and one
never quite reconciles himself to them. The Frenchmen,
who expected to find there the climate of their
native land, and ripen her wines in as kindly a sun,
have perpetuated the image of home in so many
things, that it goes to the heart with a painful emotion
to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon
them. As you ponder some characteristic aspect of
Quebec, — a bit of street with heavy stone houses,
opening upon a stretch of the city wall, with a
Lombardy poplar rising slim against it, — you say,
to your satisfied soul, “Yes, it is the real thing!”
and then all at once a sense of that Northern
sky strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a

mere picture. The sky is blue, the sun is often
fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that the
pathetic radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness
that summer is but hanging over the
land, briefly poising on wings which flit at the first
dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat
before the snow. But somehow, from without or
from within, that light of the North is there.

It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the
little circular garden near Durham Terrace, where
every brightness of fall flowers abounded, — marigold,
coxcomb, snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and
sunflower. It was a substantial and hardy efflorescence,
and they fancied that fainter-hearted plants
would have pined away in that garden, where the
little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light, fell
back again with a musical shiver. The consciousness
of this latent cold, of winter only held in abeyance
by the bright sun, was not deeper even in the
once magnificent, now neglected Governor's Garden,
where there was actually a rawness in the late afternoon
air, and whither they were strolling for the
view from its height, and to pay their duty to the
obelisk raised there to the common fame of Wolfe
and Montcalm. The sounding Latin inscriptoin
celebrates the royal governor-general who erected
it almost as much as the heroes to whom it was
raised; but these spectators did not begrudge the
space given to his praise, for so fine a thought merited
praise. It enforced again the idea of a kind of

posthumous friendship between Wolfe and Montcalm,
which gives their memory its rare distinction,
and unites them, who fell in fight against each
other, as closely as if they had both died for the
same cause.

Some lasting dignity seems to linger about the
city that has once been a capital; and this odor of
fallen nobility belongs to Quebec, which was a capital
in the European sense, with all the advantages
of a small vice-regal court, and its social and political
intrigues, in the French times. Under the
English, for a hundred years it was the centre of
Colonial civilization and refinement, with a governor-general's
residence and a brilliant, easy, and
delightful society, to which the large garrison of
former days gave gayety and romance. The honors
of a capital, first shared with Montreal and
Toronto, now rest with half-savage Ottawa; and
the garrison has dwindled to a regiment of rifles,
whose presence would hardly be known, but for the
natty sergeants lounging, stick in hand, about the
streets and courting the nurse-maids. But in the
days of old there were scenes of carnival pleasure
in the Governor's Garden, and there the garrison
band still plays once a week, when it is filled by
the fashion and beauty of Quebec, and some semblance
of the past is recalled. It is otherwise a
lonesome, indifferently tended place, and on this
afternoon there was no one there but a few loafing
young fellows of low degree, French and English,

and children that played screaming from seat to
seat and path to path and over the too-heavily
shaded grass. In spite of a conspicuous warning
that any dog entering the garden would be destroyed,
the place was thronged with dogs unmolested
and apparently in no danger of the threatened
doom. The seal of a disagreeable desolation
was given in the legend rudely carved upon one of
the benches, “Success to the Irish Republic!”

The morning of the next day our tourists gave
to hearing mass at the French cathedral, which was
not different, to their heretical senses, from any
other mass, except that the ceremony was performed
with a very full clerical force, and was attended by
an uncommonly devout congregation. With Europe
constantly in their minds, they were bewildered
to find the worshippers not chiefly old and
young women, but men also of all ages and of every
degree, from the neat peasant in his Sabbath-day
best to the modish young Quebecker, who spread
his handkerchief on the floor to save his pantaloons
during supplication. There was fashion and education
in large degree among the men, and there was
in all a pious attention to the function in poetical
keeping with the origin and history of a city which
the zeal of the Church had founded.

A magnificent beadle, clothed in a gold-laced
coat and bearing a silver staff, bowed to them when
they entered, and, leading them to a pew, punched
up a kneeling peasant, who mutely resumed his

prayers in the aisle outside, while they took his
place. It appeared to Isabel very unjust that their
curiosity should displace his religion; but she consoled
herself by making Basil give a shilling to the
man who, preceded by the shining beadle, came
round to take up a collection. The peasant could
have given nothing but copper, and she felt that
this restored the lost balance of righteousness in
their favor. There was a sermon, very sweetly and
gracefully delivered by a young priest of singular
beauty, even among clergy whose good looks are so
notable as those of Quebec; and then they followed
the orderly crowd of worshippers out, and left the
cathedral to the sacristan and the odor of incense.

They thought the type of French-Canadian better
here than at Montreal, and they particularly noticed
the greater number of pretty young girls. All
classes were well dressed; for though the best
dressed could not be called stylish according to the
American standard, as Isabel decided, and had only
a provincial gentility, the poorest wore garments
that were clean and whole. Everybody, too, was
going to have a hot Sunday dinner, if there was
any truth in the odors that steamed out of every
door and window; and this dinner was to be abundantly
garnished with onions, for the dullest nose
could not err concerning that savor.

Numbers of tourists, of a nationality that showed
itself superior to every distinction of race, were
strolling vaguely, and not always quite happily

about; but they made no impression on the proper
local character, and the air throughout the morning
was full of the sentiment of Sunday in a Catholic
city. There was the apparently meaningless jangling
of bells, with profound hushes between, and
then more jubilant jangling, and then deeper silence;
there was the devout trooping of the crowds to the
churches; and there was the beginning of the long
afternoon's lounging and amusement with which
the people of that faith reward their morning's devotion.
Little stands for the sale of knotty apples
and choke-cherries and cakes and cider sprang magically
into existence after service, and people were
already eating and drinking at them. The carriage-drivers
resumed their chase of the tourists, and the
unvoiceful stir of the new week had begun again.
Quebec, in fact, is but a pantomimic reproduction
of France; it is as if two centuries in a new land,
amidst the primeval silences of nature and the long
hush of the Northern winters, had stilled the tongues
of the lively folk and made them taciturn as we of
a graver race. They have kept the ancestral vivacity
of manner; the elegance of the shrug is intact;
the talking hands take part in dialogue; the agitated
person will have its share of expression. But the
loud and eager tone is wanting, and their dumb
show mystifies the beholder almost as much as the
Southern architecture under the slanting Northern
sun. It is not America; if it is not France, what
is it?

Of the many beautiful things to see in the neighborhood
of Quebec, our wedding-journeyers were in
doubt on which to bestow their one precious afternoon.
Should it be Lorette, with its cataract and
its remnant of bleached and fading Hurons, or the
Isle of Orleans with its fertile farms and its primitive
peasant life, or Montmorenci, with the unrivaled
fall and the long drive through the beautiful
village of Beauport? Isabel chose the last, because
Basil had been there before, and it had to it
the poetry of the wasted years in which she did not
know him. She had possessed herself of the journal
of his early travels, among the other portions
and parcels recoverable from the dreadful past, and
from time to time on this journey she had read him
passages out of it, with mingled sentiment and
irony, and, whether she was mocking or admiring,
equally to his confusion. Now, as they smoothly
bowled away from the city, she made him listen to
what he had written of the same excursion long
ago.

It was, to be sure, a sad farrago of sentiment
about the village and the rural sights, and especially
a girl tossing hay in the field. Yet it had touches
of nature and reality, and Basil could not utterly
despise himself for having written it. “Yes,” he
said, “life was then a thing to be put into pretty
periods; now it 's something that has risks and averages,
and may be insured.”

There was regret, fancied or expressed, in his

tone, that made her sigh, “Ah! if I'd only had a
little more money, you might have devoted yourself
to literature;” for she was a true Bostonian in her
honor of our poor craft.

“O, you're not greatly to blame,” answered her
husband, “and I forgive you the little wrong you've
done me. I was quits with the Muse, at any rate,
you know, before we were married; and I'm very
well satisfied to be going back to my applications
and policies to-morrow.”

To-morrow? The word struck cold upon her.
Then their wedding journey would begin to end to-morrow!
So it would, she owned with another
sigh; and yet it seemed impossible.

“There, ma'am,” said the driver, rising from his
seat and facing round, while he pointed with his
whip towards Quebec, “that 's what we call the Silver
City.”

They looked back with him at the city, whose
thousands of tinned roofs, rising one above the other
from the water's edge to the citadel, were all a
splendor of argent light in the afternoon sun. It
was indeed as if some magic had clothed that huge
rock, base and steepy flank and crest, with a silver
city. They gazed upon the marvel with cries of joy
that satisfied the driver's utmost pride in it, and
Isabel said, “To live there, there in that Silver
City, in perpetual sojourn! To be always going to
go on a morrow that never came! To be forever
within one day of the end of a wedding journey
that never ended!”

From far down the river by which they rode
came the sound of a cannon, breaking the Sabbath
repose of the air. “That 's the gun of the Liverpool
steamer, just coming in,” said the driver.

“O,” cried Isabel, “I'm thankful we're only to
stay one night more, for now we shall be turned
out of our nice room by those people who telegraphed
for it!”

There is a continuous village along the St. Lawrence
from Quebec, almost to Montmorenci; and
they met crowds of villagers coming from the
church as they passed through Beauport. But
Basil was dismayed at the change that had befallen
them. They had their Sunday's best on, and
the women, instead of wearing the peasant costume
in which he had first seen them, were now dressed
as if out of “Harper's Bazar” of the year before.
He anxiously asked the driver if the broad straw
hats and the bright sacks and kirtles were no more.
“O, you'd see them on weekdays, sir,” was the
answer, “but they're not so plenty any time as
they used to be.” He opened his store of facts
about the habitans, whom he praised for every
virtue, — for thrift, for sobriety, for neatness, for
amiability; and his words ought to have had the
greater weight, because he was of the Irish race,
between which and the Canadians there is no kindness
lost. But the looks of the passers-by corroborated
him, and as for the little houses, open-doored
beside the way, with the pleasant faces at window

and portal, they were miracles of picturesqueness
and cleanliness. From each the owner's slim domain,
narrowing at every successive division among
the abundant generations, runs back to hill or river
in well-defined lines, and beside the cottage is a
garden of pot-herbs, bordered with a flame of bright
autumn flowers; somewhere in decent seclusion
grunts the fattening pig, which is to enrich all
those peas and onions for the winter's broth; there
is a cheerfulness of poultry about the barns; I dare
be sworn there is always a small girl driving a flock
of decorous ducks down the middle of the street;
and of the priest with a book under his arm, passing
a way-side shrine, what possible doubt? The
houses, which are of one model, are built by the
peasants themselves with the stone which their land
yields more abundantly than any other crop, and
are furnished with galleries and balconies to catch
every ray of the fleeting summer, and perhaps to
remember the long-lost ancestral summers of Normandy.
At every moment, in passing through this
ideally neat and pretty village, our tourists must
think of the lovely poem of which all French
Canada seems but a reminiscence and illustration.
It was Grand Pré, not Beauport; and they paid
an eager homage to the beautiful genius which has
touched those simple village aspects with an undying
charm, and which, whatever the land's political
allegiance, is there perpetual Seigneur.

The village, stretching along the broad intervale

of the St. Lawrence, grows sparser as you draw
near the Falls of Montmorenci, and presently you
drive past the grove shutting from the road the
country-house in which the Duke of Kent spent
some merry days of his jovial youth, and come in
sight of two lofty towers of stone, — monuments
and witnesses of the tragedy of Montmorenci.

Once a suspension-bridge, built sorely against
the will of the neighboring habitans, hung from
these towers high over the long plunge of the cataract.
But one morning of the fatal spring after
the first winter's frost had tried the hold of the
cable on the rocks, an old peasant and his wife
with their little grandson set out in their cart to
pass the bridge. As they drew near the middle
the anchoring wires suddenly lost their grip upon
the shore, and whirled into the air; the bridge
crashed under the hapless passengers and they were
launched from its height upon the verge of the fall
and thence plunged, two hundred and fifty feet,
into the ruin of the abyss.

The habitans rebuilt their bridge of wood upon
low stone piers, so far up the river from the cataract
that whoever fell from it would yet have many
a chance for life; and it would have been perilous
to offer to replace the fallen structure, which, in
the belief of faithful Christians, clearly belonged
to the numerous bridges built by the Devil, in
times when the Devil did not call himself a civil
engineer.

The driver, with just unction, recounted the sad
tale as he halted his horses on the bridge; and as
his passengers looked down the rock-fretted brown
torrent towards the fall, Isabel seized the occasion
to shudder that ever she had set foot on that suspension-bridge
below Niagara, and to prove to
Basil's confusion that her doubt of the bridges
between the Three Sisters was not a case of nerves
but an instinctive wisdom concerning the unsafety
of all bridges of that design.

From the gate opening into the grounds about
the fall two or three little French boys, whom they
had not the heart to forbid, ran noisily before them
with cries in their sole English, “This way, sir!”
and led toward a weather-beaten summer-house
that tottered upon a projecting rock above the
verge of the cataract. But our tourists shook their
heads, and turned away for a more distant and less
dizzy enjoyment of the spectacle, though any commanding
point was sufficiently chasmal and precipitous.
The lofty bluff was scooped inward from
the St. Lawrence in a vast irregular semicircle,
with cavernous hollows, one within another, sinking
far into its sides, and naked from foot to crest, or
meagrely wooded here and there with evergreen.
From the central brink of these gloomy purple
chasms the foamy cataract launched itself, and like
a cloud, —

I say a cloud, because I find it already said to
my hand, as it were, in a pretty verse, and because
I must needs liken Montmorenci to something that
is soft and light. Yet a cloud does not represent
the glinting of the water in its downward swoop;
it is like some broad slope of sun-smitten snow;
but snow is coldly white and opaque, and this has
a creamy warmth in its luminous mass; and so,
there hangs the cataract unsaid as before. It is a
mystery that anything so grand should be so lovely,
that anything so tenderly fair in whatever aspect
should yet be so large that one glance fails to comprehend
it all. The rugged wildness of the cliffs
and hollows about it is softened by its gracious
beauty, which half redeems the vulgarity of the
timber-merchant's uses in setting the river at work
in his saw-mills and choking its outlet into the St.
Lawrence with rafts of lumber and rubbish of slabs
and shingles. Nay, rather, it is alone amidst these
things, and the eye takes note of them by a separate
effort.

Our tourists sank down upon the turf that crept
with its white clover to the edge of the precipice,
and gazed dreamily upon the fall, filling their vision
with its exquisite color and form. Being wiser
than I, they did not try to utter its loveliness; they
were content to feel it, and the perfection of the
afternoon, whose low sun slanting over the landscape
gave, under that pale, greenish-blue sky, a
pensive sentiment of autumn to the world. The

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 610EAF. Page 262. In-line Illustration. Image of a man and a woman reclining on the ground. Their backs are to the reader and they are looking out at the view.] crickets cried amongst the grass; the hesitating
chirp of birds came from the tree overhead; a
shaggy colt left off grazing in the field and stalked
up to stare at them; their little guides, having
found that these people had no pleasure in the
sight of small boys scuffling on the verge of a precipice,
threw themselves also down upon the grass
and crooned a long, long ballad in a mournful
minor key about some maiden whose name was La
Belle Adeline. It was a moment of unmixed enjoyment
for every sense, and through all their being
they were glad; which considering, they ceased to
be so, with a deep sigh, as one reasoning that he
dreams must presently awake. They never could
have an emotion without desiring to analyze it;
but perhaps their rapture would have ceased as
swiftly, even if they had not tried to make it a fact
of consciousness.

“If there were not dinner after such experiences
as these,” said Isabel, as they sat at table that
evening, “I don't know what would become of one.
But dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty,
and brings you gently back to earth. You must
eat, don't you see, and there 's nothing disgraceful
about what you're obliged to do; and so — it 's all
right.”

“Isabel, Isabel,” cried her husband, “you have
a wonderful mind, and its workings always amaze
me. But be careful, my dear; be careful. Don't
work it too hard. The human brain, you know;
delicate organ.”

“Well, you understand what I mean; and I
think it 's one of the great charms of a husband,

that you're not forced to express yourself to him.
A husband,” continued Isabel, sententiously, poising
a bit of meringue between her thumb and finger,
— for they had reached that point in the repast, —
“a husband is almost as good as another woman!”

In the parlor they found the Ellisons, and exchanged
the history of the day with them.

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Ellison, at the end, “it 's
been a pleasant day enough, but what of the night?
You've been turned out, too, by those people who
came on the steamer, and who might as well have
stayed on board to-night; have you got another
room?”

“Not precisely,” said Isabel; “we have a coop
in the fifth story, right under the roof.”

Mrs. Ellison turned energetically upon her husband
and cried in tones of reproach, “Richard,
Mrs. March has a room!”

“A coop, she said,” retorted that amiable
Colonel, “and we're too good for that. The clerk
is keeping us in suspense about a room, because he
means to surprise us with something palatial at the
end. It 's his joking way.”

“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Ellison. “Have you
seen him since dinner?”

“I have made life a burden to him for the last
half-hour,” returned the Colonel, with the kindliest
smile.

“O Richard,” cried his wife, in despair of his
amendment, “you wouldn't make life a burden to

a mouse!” And having nothing else for it, she
laughed, half in sorrow, half in fondness.

“Well, Fanny,” the Colonel irrelevantly answered,
“put on your hat and things, and let 's all
go up to Durham Terrace for a promenade. I know
our friends want to go. It 's something worth seeing;
and by the time we get back, the clerk will
have us a perfectly sumptuous apartment.”

Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of
Southern Europe in Quebec than the Sunday-night
promenading on Durham Terrace. This is the
ample space on the brow of the cliff to the left of
the citadel, the noblest and most commanding position
in the whole city, which was formerly occupied
by the old castle of Saint Louis, where dwelt the
brave Count Frontenac and his splendid successors
of the French régime. The castle went the way
of Quebec by fire some forty years ago, and Lord
Durham leveled the site and made it a public promenade.
A stately arcade of solid masonry supports
it on the brink of the rock, and an iron parapet incloses
it; there are a few seats to lounge upon, and
some idle old guns for the children to clamber over
and play with. A soft twilight had followed the
day, and there was just enough obscurity to hide
from a willing eye the Northern and New World
facts of the scene, and to bring into more romantic
relief the citadel dark against the mellow evening,
and the people gossiping from window to window
across the narrow streets of the Lower Town. The

Terrace itself was densely thronged, and there was
a constant coming and going of the promenaders,
who each formally paced back and forth upon the
planking for a certain time, and then went quietly
home, giving place to the new arrivals. They were
nearly all French, and they were not generally, it
seemed, of the first fashion, but rather of middling
condition in life; the English being represented only
by a few young fellows and now and then a red-faced
old gentleman with an Indian scarf trailing
from his hat. There were some fair American
costumes and faces in the crowd, but it was essentially
Quebecian. The young girls walking in pairs,
or with their lovers, had the true touch of provincial
unstylishness, the young men the ineffectual
excess of the second-rate Latin dandy, their elders
the rich inelegance of a bourgeoisie in their best.
A few better-figured avocats or notaires (their profession
was as unmistakable as if they had carried
their well-polished brass doorplates upon their
breasts) walked and gravely talked with each other.
The non-American character of the scene was not
less vividly marked in the fact that each person
dressed according to his own taste and frankly indulged
private preferences in shapes and colors. One
of the promenaders was in white, even to his canvas
shoes; another, with yet bolder individuality, appeared
in perfect purple. It had a strange, almost
portentous effect when these two startling figures
met as friends and joined each other in the promenade
with linked arms; but the evening was already
beginning to darken round them, and presently the
purple comrade was merely a sombre shadow beside
the glimmering white.

The valleys and the heights now vanished; but
the river defined itself by the varicolored lights of
the ships and steamers that lay, dark, motionless
bulks, upon its broad breast; the lights of Point
Levis swarmed upon the other shore; the Lower
Town, two hundred feet below them, stretched an
alluring mystery of clustering roofs and lamplit
windows and dark and shining streets around the
mighty rock, mural-crowned. Suddenly a spectacle
peculiarly Northern and characteristic of Quebec revealed
itself; a long arch brightened over the northern
horizon; the tremulous flames of the aurora,
pallid violet or faintly tinged with crimson, shot upward
from it, and played with a weird apparition
and evanescence to the zenith. While the strangers
looked, a gun boomed from the citadel, and the
wild sweet notes of the bugle sprang out upon the
silence.

Then they all said, “How perfectly in keeping
everything has been!” and sauntered back to the
hotel.

The Colonel went into the office to give the clerk
another turn on the rack, and make him confess to
a hidden apartment somewhere, while Isabel left
her husband to Mrs. Ellison in the parlor, and invited
Miss Kitty to look at her coop in the fifth

story. As they approached, light and music and
laughter stole out of an open door next hers, and
Isabel, distinguishing the voices of the theatrical
party, divined that this was the sick-chamber, and
that they were again cheering up the afflicted member
of the troupe. Some one was heard to say,
“Well, 'ow do you feel now, Charley?” and a
sound of subdued swearing responded, followed by
more laughter, and the twanging of a guitar, and a
snatch of song, and a stir of feet and dresses as for
departure.

The two listeners shrank together; as women
they could not enjoy these proofs of the jolly camaraderie
existing among the people of the troupe.
They trembled as before the merriment of as many
light-hearted, careless, good-natured young men:
it was no harm, but it was dismaying; and,
“Dear!” cried Isabel, “what shall we do?”

“Go back,” said Miss Ellison, boldly, and back
they ran to the parlor, where they found Basil and
the Colonel and his wife in earnest conclave. The
Colonel, like a shrewd strategist, was making show
of a desperation more violent than his wife's, who
was thus naturally forced into the attitude of moderating
his fury.

“Well, Fanny, that 's all he can do for us; and
I do think it 's the most outrageous thing in the
world! It 's real mean!”

Fanny perceived a bold parody of her own denunciatory
manner, but just then she was obliged

to answer Isabel's eager inquiry whether they had
got a room yet. “Yes, a room,” she said, “with
two beds. But what are we to do with one room?
That clerk — I don't know what to call him” —
(“Call him a hotel-clerk, my dear; you can't say
anything worse,” interrupted her husband) —
“seems to think the matter perfectly settled.”

“You see, Mrs. March,” added the Colonel,
“he 's able to bully us in this way because he has
the architecture on his side. There isn't another
room in the house.”

“Let me think a moment,” said Isabel not thinking
an instant. She had taken a fancy to at least
two of these people from the first, and in the last
hour they had all become very well acquainted;
now she said, “I'll tell you: there are two beds in
our room also; we ladies will take one room, and
you gentlemen the other!”

“Mrs. March, I bow to the superiority of the
Boston mind,” said the Colonel, while his females
civilly protested and consented; “and I might
almost hail you as our preserver. If ever you come
to Milwaukee, — which is the centre of the world,
as Boston is, — we — I — shall be happy to have
you call at my place of business. — I didn't commit
myself, did I, Fanny? — I am sometimes hospitable
to excess, Mrs. March,” he said, to explain his
aside. “And now, let us reconnoitre. Lead on,
madam, and the gratitude of the houseless stranger
will follow you.”

The whole party explored both rooms, and the
ladies decided to keep Isabel's. The Colonel was
dispatched to see that the wraps and traps of his
party were sent to this number, and Basil went
with him. The things came long before the gentlemen
returned, but the ladies happily employed the
interval in talking over the excitements of the day,
and in saying from time to time, “So very kind of
you, Mrs. March,” and “I don't know what we
should have done,” and “Don't speak of it, please,”
and “I'm sure it 's a great pleasure to me.”

In the room adjoining theirs, where the invalid
actor lay, and where lately there had been minstrelsy
and apparently dancing for his solace, there
was now comparative silence. Two women's voices
talked together, and now and then a guitar was
touched by a wandering hand. Isabel had just put
up her handkerchief to conceal her first yawn, when
the gentlemen, odorous of cigars, returned to say
good-night.

“It 's the second door from this, isn't it, Isabel?”
asked her husband.

“Yes, the second door. Good-night.”

“Good-night.”

The two men walked off together; but in a minute
afterwards they had returned and were knocking
tremulously at the closed door.

“O, what has happened?” chorused the ladies
in woeful tune, seeing a certain wildness in the faces
that confronted them.

“We don't know!” answered the others in as
fearful a key, and related how they had found the
door of their room ajar, and a bright light streaming
into the corridor. They did not stop to ponder
this fact, but, with the heedlessness of their sex,
pushed the door wide open, when they saw seated
before the mirror a bewildering figure, with disheveled
locks wandering down the back, and in
dishabille expressive of being quite at home there,
which turned upon them a pair of pale blue eyes,
under a forehead remarkable for the straggling
fringe of hair that covered it. They professed to
have remained transfixed at the sight, and to have
noted a like dismay on the visage before the glass,
ere they summoned strength to fly. These facts
Colonel Ellison gave at the command of his wife,
with many protests and insincere delays amidst
which the curiosity of his hearers alone prevented
them from rending him in pieces.

“And what do you suppose it was?” demanded
his wife, with forced calmness, when he had at last
made an end of the story and his abominable hypocrisies.

“Well, I think it was a mermaid.

“A mermaid!” said his wife, scornfully. “How
do you know?”

“It had a comb in its hand, for one thing; and
besides, my dear, I hope I know a mermaid when
I see it.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Ellison, “it was no mermaid,

it was a mistake; and I'm going to see about it.
Will you go with me, Richard?”

“No money could induce me! If it 's a mistake,
it isn't proper for me to go; if it 's a mermaid, it 's
dangerous.”

“O you coward!” said the intrepid little woman
to a hero of all the fights on Sherman's march to
the sea; and presently they heard her attack the
mysterious enemy with a lady-like courage, claiming
the invaded chamber. The foe replied with
like civility, saying the clerk had given her that
room with the understanding that another lady was
to be put there with her, and she had left the door
unlocked to admit her. The watchers with the sick
man next door appeared and confirmed this speech;
a feeble voice from the bedclothes swore to it.

“Of course,” added the invader, “if I'd known
'ow it really was, I never would 'ave listened to
such a thing, never. And there isn't another 'ole
in the 'ouse to lay me 'ead,” she concluded.

“Then it 's the clerk's fault,” said Mrs. Ellison,
glad to retreat unharmed; and she made her husband
ring for the guilty wretch, a pale, quiet young
Frenchman, whom the united party, sallying into
the corridor, began to upbraid in one breath, the
lady in dishabille vanishing as often as she remembered
it, and reappearing whenever some strong
point of argument or denunciation occurred to her.

The clerk, who was the Benjamin of his wicked
tribe, threw himself upon their mercy and confessed

everything: the house was so crowded, and he had
been so crazed by the demands upon him, that he
had understood Colonel Ellison's application to be
for a bed for the young lady in his party, and he
had done the very best he could. If the lady there
— she vanished again — would give up the room to
the two gentlemen, he would find her a place with
the housekeeper. To this the lady consented without
difficulty, and the rest dispersing, she kissed
one of the sick man's watchers with “Isn't it a
shame, Bella?” and flitted down the darkness of
the corridor. The rooms upon it seemed all, save
the two assigned our travellers, to be occupied by
ladies of the troupe; their doors successively opened,
and she was heard explaining to each as she passed.
The momentary displeasure which she had shown
at her banishment was over. She detailed the facts
with perfect good-nature, and though the others appeared
no more than herself to find any humorous
cast in the affair, they received her narration with
the same amiability. They uttered their sympathy
seriously, and each parted from her with some
friendly word. Then all was still.

“Richard,” said Mrs. Ellison, when in Isabel's
room the travellers had briefly celebrated these
events, “I should think you'd hate to leave us alone
up here.”

“I do; but you can't think how I hate to go off
alone. I wish you'd come part of the way with us,

ladies; I do indeed. Leave your door unlocked, at
any rate.”

This prayer, uttered at parting outside the room,
was answered from within by a sound of turning
keys and sliding bolts, and a low thunder as of bureaus
and washstands rolled against the door.
“The ladies are fortifying their position,” said the
Colonel to Basil, and the two returned to their own
chamber. “I don't wish any intrusions,” he said,
instantly shutting himself in; “my nerves are too
much shaken now. What an awfully mysterious
old place this Quebec is, Mr. March! I'll tell you
what: it 's my opinion that this is an enchanted
castle, and if my ribs are not walked over by a
muleteer in the course of the night, it 's all I ask.”

In this and other discourse recalling the famous
adventure of Don Quixote, the Colonel beguiled the
labor of disrobing, and had got as far as his boots,
when there came a startling knock at the door.
With one boot in his hand and the other on his
foot, the Colonel limped forward. “I suppose it 's
that clerk has sent to say he 's made some other
mistake,” and he flung wide the door, and then
stood motionless before it, dumbly staring at a figure
on the threshold, — a figure with the fringed
forehead and pale blue eyes of her whom they had
so lately turned out of that room.

Shrinking behind the side of the doorway, “Excuse
me, gentlemen,” she said, with a dignity that
recalled their scattered senses, “but will you 'ave

the goodness to look if my beads are on your table?
O thanks, thanks, thanks!” she continued, showing
her face and one hand, as Basil blushingly advanced
with a string of heavy black beads, piously adorned
with a large cross. “I'm sure, I'm greatly obliged
to you, gentlemen, and I hask a thousand pardons
for troublin' you,” she concluded in a somewhat
severe tone, that left them abashed and culpable;
and vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared.

“Now, see here,” said the Colonel, with a huge
sigh as he closed the door again, and this time
locked it, “I should like to know how long this sort
of thing is to be kept up? Because, if it 's to be
regularly repeated during the night, I'm going to
dress again.” Nevertheless, he finished undressing
and got into bed, where he remained for some time
silent. Basil put out the light. “O, I'm sorry you
did that, my dear fellow,” said the Colonel; “but
never mind, it was an idle curiosity, no doubt. It 's
my belief that in the landlord's extremity of bedlinen,
I've been put to sleep between a pair of table-cloths;
and I thought I'd like to look. It
seems to me that I make out a checkered pattern
on top and a flowered or arabesque pattern underneath.
I wish they had given me mates. It 's
pretty hard having to sleep between odd table-cloths.
I shall complain to the landlord of this in
the morning. I've never had to sleep between odd
table-cloths at any hotel before.”

The Colonel's voice seemed scarcely to have died

away upon Basil's drowsy ear, when suddenly the
sounds of music and laughter from the invalid's
room startled him wide awake. The sick man's
watchers were coquetting with some one who stood
in the little court-yard five stories below. A certain
breadth of repartee was naturally allowable at
that distance; the lover avowed his passion in ardent
terms, and the ladies mocked him with the
same freedom, now and then totally neglecting him
while they sang a snatch of song to the twanging of
the guitar, or talked professional gossip, and then
returning to him with some tormenting expression
of tenderness.

All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to
Basil; yet he could recollect few things intended
for his pleasure that had given him more satisfaction.
He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight
on the high-gabled silvery roofs around and
on the gardens of the convents and the towers of
the quaint city, that the scene wanted nothing of
the proper charm of Spanish humor and romance,
and he was as grateful to those poor souls as if they
had meant him a favor. To us of the hither side
of the foot-lights, there is always something fascinating
in the life of the strange beings who dwell
beyond them, and who are never so unreal as in
their own characters. In their shabby bestowal in
those mean upper rooms, their tawdry poverty,
their merry submission to the errors and caprices
of destiny, their mutual kindliness and careless

friendship, these unprofitable devotees of the twinkling-footed
burlesque seemed to be playing rather
than living the life of strolling players; and their
love-making was the last touch of a comedy that
Basil could hardly accept as reality, it was so much
more like something seen upon the stage. He
would not have detracted anything from the commonness
and cheapness of the mise en scène, for that,
he reflected drowsily and confusedly, helped to give
it an air of fact and make it like an episode of fiction.
But above all, he was pleased with the natural
eventlessness of the whole adventure, which was
in perfect agreement with his taste; and just as his
reveries began to lose shape in dreams, he was aware
of an absurd pride in the fact that all this could
have happened to him in our commonplace time
and hemisphere. “Why,” he thought, “if I were a
student in Alcalá, what better could I have asked?”
And as at last his soul swung out from its moorings
and lapsed down the broad slowly circling tides out
in the sea of sleep, he was conscious of one subtile
touch of compassion for those poor strollers, — a
pity so delicate and fine and tender that it hardly
seemed his own but rather a sense of the compassion
that pities the whole world.