lk through the Bonsecours Market, where the habitans
have all come in their carts, with their various stores of poultry,
fruit, and vegetables, and where every cart is a study. Here is a
simple-faced young peasant-couple with butter and eggs and chickens
ravishingly displayed; here is a smooth-checked, blackeyed, black-haired
young girl, looking as if an infusion of Indian blood had darkened the
red of her cheeks, presiding over a stock of onions, potatoes, beets,
and turnips; there an old woman with a face carven like a walnut,
behind a flattering array of cherries and pears; yonder a whole family
trafficking in loaves of brown-bread and maple-sugar in many shapes of
pious and grotesque device. There are gay shows of bright scarfs and
kerchiefs and vari-colored yarns, and sad shows of old clothes and
second-hand merchandise of other sorts; but above all prevails the
abundance of orchard and garden, while within the fine edifice are the
stalls of the butchers, and in the basement below a world of household
utensils, glass-ware, hard-ware, and wooden-ware. As in other Latin
countries, each peasant has given a personal interest to his wares, but
the bargains are not clamored over as in Latin lands abroad. Whatever
protest and concession and invocation of the saints attend the
transacting of business at Bonsecours Market are in a subdued tone. The
fat huckster-women drowsing beside their wares, scarce send their voices
beyond the borders of their broad-brimmed straw hats, as they softly
haggle with purchasers, or tranquilly gossip together.

At the cathedral there are, perhaps, the worst paintings in the world,
and the massive pine-board pillars are unscrupulously smoked to look
like marble; but our tourists enjoyed it as if it had been St. Peter's;
in fact it has something of the barnlike immensity and impressiveness of
St. Peter's. They did not ask it to be beautiful or grand; they desired
it only to recall the beloved ugliness, the fondly cherished hideousness
and incongruity of the average Catholic churches of their remembrance,
and it did this and more: it added an effect of its own; it offered
the spectacle of a swarthy old Indian kneeling before the high altar,
telling his beads, and saying with many sighs and tears the prayers
which it cost so much martyrdom and heroism to teach his race. "O, it is
only a savage man," said the little French boy who was showing them
the place, impatient of their interest in a thing s