the feet, was it once torn with shot and soaked with the
blood of men? Did they lie here in ranks and heaps, the miserable slain,
for whom tender hearts away yonder over the sea were to ache and break?
Did the wretches that fell wounded stretch themselves here, and writhe
beneath the feet of friend and foe, or crawl array for shelter into
little hollows, and behind gushes and fallen trees! Did he, whose soul
was so full of noble and sublime impulses, die here, shot through like
some ravening beast? The loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din
of arms, the cries of victory,--I vainly strive to conjure up some image
of it all now; and God be thanked, horrible spectre! that, fill the
world with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still remainest incredible in
its moments of sanity and peace. Least credible art thou on the old
battle-fields, where the mother of the race denies thee with breeze
and sun and leaf and bird, and every blade of grass! The red stain in
Basil's thought yielded to the rain sweeping across the pasture-land
from which it had long since faded, and the words on the monument, "Here
died Wolfe victorious," did not proclaim his bloody triumph over the
French, but his self-conquest, his victory over fear and pain and love
of life. Alas! when shall the poor, blind, stupid world honor those who
renounce self in the joy of their kind, equally with those who devote
themselves through the anguish and loss of thousands? So old a world and
groping still!

The tourists were better fitted for the next occasion of sentiment,
which was at the Hotel Dieu whither they went after returning from the
battlefield. It took all the mal-address of which travellers are masters
to secure admittance, and it was not till they had rung various wrong
bells, and misunderstood many soft nun-voices speaking French through
grated doors, and set divers sympathetic spectators doing ineffectual
services, that they at last found the proper entrance, and were answered
in English that the porter would ask if they might see the chapel. They
hoped to find there the skull of Brebeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs
who perished long ago for the conversion of a race that has perished,
and whose relics they had come, fresh from their reading of Parkman,
with some vague and patronizing intention to revere. An elderly sister
with a pale, kind face led them through a ward of the hospital into the
chapel, which they found in the expected taste, and exquisitel