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 Pre, 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 interval 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