roads that lead out from the city; the great black cross of the French parish church showing reverently above them all. 3. On the north, the eye ranges to the rugged outlines of the Laurentian chain, composed of the oldest mountains in the world, at the foot of which is Lake St. Charles, where at a later time I learnt to paddle an Indian canoe of birch-bark. 4. Leaving the citadel,' we are at once in the European middle ages. Gates and posterns, cranky steps that lead up to gabled houses with sharp French roofs of burnished tin, like those of Liége; altars decked with flowers; statues of the Virgin; sabots, blouses, and the scarlet of the British soldier-all these are seen in narrow streets and markets that are graced with many a lace cap, and all within forty miles of the 'down-east' Yankee State of Maine. It is not far from New England to old France. 5. Quebec Lower Town is very like St. Peter Port in Guernsey. Norman-French inhabitants, guarded by British troops, step-built streets, a thronged fruit market, and a citadel upon a rock, frowning down upon the quays, are alike in each. 6. There has been no dying out of the race among the French Canadians. They number twenty times 1 Citadel, a strong tower or fort. 2 Postern, a back gate. Sabots (pronounce sab-ohs), wooden shoes worn almost universally by French peasants, as being far less costly than leather, and keeping the feet drier and warmer. Similar shoes called clogs are worn in Lancashire. the thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The American soil has left their physical type,1 religion, language, laws, and habits absolutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling villages, dance to the fiddle after mass on Sundays as gaily as once did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lys 2 and the memory of Montcalm.3 More French than the French of France are the inhabitants of Lower Canada. 7. Wherever a Frenchman goes he carries with him the habits and manners of France as it was when he left it, and it becomes his pride and boast to maintain these customs and to teach them to his children. The Englishman founds everywhere a New England-new in thought as in soil; the Frenchman carries with him to California and to Japan an undying recollection of the Palais Royal.^ In San Francisco there lives a French settler who has been wonderfully successful in all he has undertaken, and who is therefore extremely wealthy. Although California is a country of fruit and wine, his greatest pleasure is to bid his old French servant assure him that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, has been brought for him from France. 1 Physical type, style of face and figure, personal appearance. 1 Palais Royal, a large enclosure in Paris, originally built as a Royal palace, with rooms for hosts of retainers of all classes, but now used for bazaars, shops, coffee-houses, breakfast and dining rooms, with covered walks, cloisters, or colonnades, surrounding the inner courtyard, grass-plots and gardens. There is much in the colonising instinct' of our race, but something, perhaps, in the consideration that the English are hardly happy enough at home to be always looking back to what they have left in the old country. 8. There is about this old France something of Dutch sleepiness and content. There is, indeed, some bustle in the market-place, where the grand old dames in snowy caps sit selling plums and pears; there is much singing made over the lading of the timber ships, there are rafts in hundreds gliding down the rivers, old French carts in dozens, creaking and wheezing on their lumbering way to town, with much clacking of whips and clattering of wooden shoes. There is quiet bustle, subdued trade, prosperity deep, not noisy; but the life is sleepy; the rafts float, and are not tugged nor rowed; the old Norman horses seem to draw the still older carts without an effort, and the very boys wear noisy shoes against their will, and make a clatter simply because they cannot help it. 9. In such a scene it is impossible to forget that British troops are here employed as guardians of the only true French colony in the world against the inroads of the English race.2 1 Colonising instinct, the tendency and aptness of the English to settle in other lands and to found colonies, as they have done in suitable countries all over the world. 2 The English race here referred to are the inhabitants of the United States adjoining Canada on the south, CANADA. PART II. 1. PORTLAND is the chief town of the state of Maine, the most eastern of the United States, and lies due south of Quebec. In journeying from the former to the latter of these towns, the moment the frontier was passed we seemed to have come from a land of life to one of death, There were no more bustling villages, no more keen-eyed farmers; roads were wanting, the houses were rude, the swamps undrained, the fields unweeded, the plains untilled. 2. If the eastern townships are a wilderness, they are not a desert. The country on the Saguenay1 is both. At Quebec in summer it is hot-mosquitoes are not unknown; but when once we are in the northern river, all is cold, gloomy, arctic-- there is neither house, nor boat, nor sign of man's existence; there are no beasts, and no birds, although the St. Lawrence swarms with ducks and loons. The river is a straight, cold, black fiord,2 walled in by tremendous cliffs, which go sheer down into depths to which their height above water is as nothing; we have nothing but two walls of rock, 'The Saguenay, a river which runs into the estuary of the St. Lawrence. 2 Fiord, the name given to the land-locked, crag-bound inlets along the coast of Norway. |