o lounge upon, and some idle old guns
for the children to clamber over and play with. A soft twilight had
followed the day, and there was just enough obscurity to hide from a
willing eye the Northern and New World facts of the scene, and to bring
into more romantic relief the citadel dark against the mellow evening,
and the people gossiping from window to window across the narrow streets
of the Lower Town. The Terrace itself was densely thronged, and there was
a constant coming and going of the promenaders, who each formally paced
back and forth upon the planking for a certain time, and then went
quietly home, giving place to the new arrivals. They were nearly all
French, and they were not generally, it seemed, of the first fashion, but
rather of middling condition in life; the English being represented only
by a few young fellows and now and then a redfaced old gentleman with an
Indian scarf trailing from his hat. There were some fair American
costumes and faces in the crowd, but it was essentially Quebecian. The
young girls walking in pairs, or with their lovers, had the true touch of
provincial unstylishness, the young men the ineffectual excess of the
second-rate Latin dandy, their elders the rich inelegance of a
bourgeoisie in their best. A few, better-figured avocats or notaires
(their profession was as unmistakable as if they had carried their
well-polished brass doorplates upon their breasts) walked and gravely
talked with each other. The non-American character of the scene was not
less vividly marked in the fact that each person dressed according to his
own taste and frankly indulged private preferences in shapes and colors.
One of the promenaders was in white, even to his canvas shoes; another,
with yet bolder individuality, appeared in perfect purple. It had a
strange, almost portentous effect when these two startling figures met as
friends and joined each other in the promenade with linked arms; but the
evening was already beginning to darken round them, and presently the
purple comrade was merely a sombre shadow beside the glimmering white.

The valleys and the heights now vanished; but the river defined itself by
the varicolored lights of the ships and steamers that lay, dark,
motionless bulks, upon its broad breast; the lights of Point Lewis
swarmed upon the other shore; the Lower Town, two hundred feet below
them, stretched an alluring mystery of clustering roofs and lamplit
windows and dark and shining s