t 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 fast 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, wept, 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 late; 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 w