d, Irish tatterdemalion stood transfigured to
the glorious likeness of an Italian beggar.

They were always doing something of this kind, those absurdly
sentimental people, whom yet I cannot find it in my heart to blame for
their folly, though I could name ever so many reasons for rebuking it.
Why, in fact, should we wish to find America like Europe? Are the ruins
and impostures and miseries and superstitions which beset the traveller
abroad so precious, that he should desire to imagine them at every step
in his own hemisphere? Or have we then of our own no effective shapes of
ignorance and want and incredibility, that we must forever seek an alien
contrast to our native intelligence and comfort? Some such questions
this guilty couple put to each other, and then drove off to visit the
convent of the Gray Nuns with a joyful expectation which I suppose the
prospect of the finest public-school exhibition in Boston could never
have inspired. But, indeed, since there must be Gray Nuns, is it not
well that there are sentimentalists to take a mournful pleasure in their
sad, pallid existence?

The convent is at a good distance from the Irish cathedral, and in going
to it the tourists made their driver carry them through one of the
few old French streets which still remain in Montreal. Fires and
improvements had made havoc among the quaint horses since Basil's
first visit; but at last they came upon a narrow, ancient Rue Saint
Antoine,--or whatever other saint it was called after,--in which
there was no English face or house to be seen. The doors of the little
one-story dwellings opened from the pavement, and within you saw fat
madame the mother moving about her domestic affairs, and spare monsieur
the elderly husband smoking beside the open window; French babies
crawled about the tidy floors; French martyrs (let us believe Lalement
or Brebeuf, who gave up their heroic lives for the conversion of Canada)
sifted their eyes in high-colored lithographs on the wall; among the
flower-pots in the dormer-window looking from every tin roof sat and
sewed a smooth haired young girl, I hope,--the romance of each little
mansion. The antique and foreign character of the place was accented by
the inscription upon a wall of "Sirop adoucissant de Madame Winslow."

Ever since 1692 the Gray Nuns have made refuge within the ample borders
of their convent for infirm old people and for foundling children, and
it is now in the regular course of sig