tics. Then he bowed,
and, as if he had relapsed into the past, he vanished through the narrow
door by which he had entered.

Basil and Isabel stood speechless a moment on the church steps. Then she
cried,

"O, why didn't something happen?"

"Ah, my dear! what could have keen half so good as the nothing that
did happen? Suppose we knew him to have taken orders because of a
disappointment in love: how common it would have made him; everybody has
been crossed in love once or twice." He bade the driver take them back
to the hotel. "This is the very bouquet of adventure why should we care
for the grosser body? I dare say if we knew all about yonder pale young
priest, we should not think him half so interesting as we do now."

At dinner they spent the intervals of the courses in guessing the
nationality of the different persons, and in wondering if the Canadians
did not make it a matter of conscientious loyalty to out-English the
English even in the matter of pale-ale and sherry, and in rotundity of
person and freshness of face, just as they emulated them in the cut of
their clothes and whiskers. Must they found even their health upon the
health of the mother-country?

Our friends began to detect something servile in it all, and but
that they were such amiable persons, the loyally perfect digestion of
Montreal would have gone far to impair their own.

The loyalty, which had already appeared to them in the cathedral,
suggested itself in many ways upon the street, when they went out after
dinner to do that little shopping which Isabel had planned to do in
Montreal. The booksellers' windows were full of Canadian editions of
our authors, and English copies of English works, instead of our pirated
editions; the dry-goods stores were gay with fabrics in the London taste
and garments of the London shape; here was the sign of a photographer to
the Queen, there of a hatter to H. R. H. the Prince of Wales; a barber
was "under the patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, H. E. the Duke
of Cambridge, and the gentry of Montreal." 'Ich dien' was the motto of
a restaurateur; a hosier had gallantly labeled his stock in trade with
'Honi soit qui mal y pense'. Again they noted the English solidity
of the civic edifices, and already they had observed in the foreign
population a difference from that at home. They saw no German faces on
the streets, and the Irish faces had not that truculence which they
wear sometimes with us. They had n