ct,
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 effective 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 horses 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 Brebeuf, who gave up their heroic
lives for the conversion of Canada) sifted 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 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 th