hat do you mean, my dear?"

"Why, the Nelson Monument, with the sunset on it at the head of the
street there."

The affect was so fine that Isabel could not be angry with him for
failing to heed what she had said, and she mused a moment with him.

"It seems rather far-fetched," she said presently, "to erect a monument
to Nelson in Montreal, doesn't it? But then, it's a very absurd monument
when you're near it," she added, thoughtfully.

Basil did not answer at once, for gazing on this Nelson column in
Jacques Cartier Square, his thoughts wandered away, not to the hero of
the Nile, but to the doughty old Breton navigator, the first white man
who ever set foot upon that shore, and who more than three hundred years
ago explored the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal, and in the splendid
autumn weather climbed to the top of her green height and named it.
The scene that Jacques Cartier then beheld, like a mirage of the fast
projected upon the present, floated before him, and he saw at the
mountain's foot the Indian city of Hochelaga, with its vast and populous
lodges of bark, its encircling palisades, and its wide outlying fields
of yellow maize. He heard with Jacques Cartier's sense the blare of his
followers' trumpets down in the open square of the barbarous city, where
the soldiers of many an Old-World fight, "with mustached lip and bearded
chin, with arquebuse and glittering halberd, helmet, and cuirass," moved
among the plumed and painted savages; then he lifted Jacques Cartier's
eyes, and looked out upon the magnificent landscape. "East, wept, and
north, the mantling forest was over all, and the broad blue ribbon of
the great river glistened amid a realm of verdure. Beyond, to the bounds
of Mexico, stretched a leafy desert, and the vast hive of industry,
the mighty battle-ground of late; centuries, lay sunk in savage torpor,
wrapped in illimitable woods."

A vaguer picture of Champlain, who, seeking a westward route to China
and the East, some three quarters of a century later, had fixed the
first trading-post at Montreal, and camped upon the spot where the
convent of the Gray Nuns now stands, appeared before him, and vanished
with all its fleets of fur-traders' boats and hunters' birch canoes,
and the watch-fires of both; and then in the sweet light of the spring
morning, he saw Maisonneuve leaping ashore upon the green meadows, that
spread all gay with early flowers where Hochelaga once stood, and with
the black-ro