glish 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 tubular 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-checked, bl