and mayhap
some skipping too. Under this plea, I have already introduced Sir Dudley
Broughton to the reader; and now, with permission, mean to present Mrs.
Davis.

Mrs. Davis, relict of Thomas John Davis, was a character so associated
with Quebec that to speak of that city without her would be like writing
an account of Newfoundland and never alluding to the article "cod-fish."
For a great number of years her house had been the rendezvous of
everything houseless, from the newly come "married" officer to the flash
commercial traveller from the States; from the agent of an unknown
land company to the "skipper" of a rank pretentious enough to dine at
a boarding-house. The establishment--as she loved to style it--combined
all the free-and-easy air of domesticity with the enjoyment of society.
It was an "acted newspaper," where paragraphs, military and naval,
social, scandalous, and commercial, were fabricated with a speed no
"compositor" could have kept up with. Here the newly arrived subaltern
heard all the pipeclay gossip, not of the garrison, but of the Province;
here the bagman made contracts and took orders; here the "French Deputy"
picked up what he called afterwards in the Chamber "l'opinion publique;"
and here the men of pine-logs and white deal imbibed what they fervently
believed to be the habits and manners of the "English aristocracy." "To
invest the establishment with this character," to make it go forth
to the world as the mirror of high and fashionable life, had been
the passion of Mrs. D.'s existence. Never did monarch labor for the
safeguard that might fence and hedge round his dynasty more zealously;
never did minister strive for the guarantees that should insure the
continuance of his system. It was the moving purpose of her life; in
it she had invested all her activity, both of mind and body; and as
she looked back to the barbarism from which her generous devotion
had rescued hundreds, she might well be pardoned if a ray of
self-glorification lighted up her face. "When I think of Quebec when
T. J."--her familiar mode of alluding to the defunct Thomas John--"and
myself first beheld it," would she say, "and see it now, I believe I may
be proud." The social habits were indeed at a low ebb. The skippers--and
there were few other strangers--had a manifest contempt for the use of
the fork at dinner, and performed a kind of sword-exercise while
eating, of the most fearful kind. Napkins were always misconstrued