ish for a hundred years; the porte-cocheres beside every
house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls;
the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the
universal dormer-windows; the littleness of the private houses, and the
greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents; the breadths
of weather-stained city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath; the
batteries, with their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of
masonry, and the red-coated sergeants flirting with nursery-maids upon
the carriages, while the children tumbled about over the pyramids of
shot and shell; the sloping market-place before the cathedral, where yet
some remnant of the morning's traffic lingered under canvas canopies,
and where Isabel bought a bouquet of marigolds and asters of an old
woman peasant enough to have sold it in any market-place of Europe; the
small, dark shops beyond the quarter invaded by English retail trade;
the movement of all the strange figures of cleric and lay and military
life; the sound of a foreign speech prevailing over the English; the
encounter of other tourists, the passage back and forth through the
different city gates; the public wooden stairways, dropping flight after
flight from the Upper to the Lower Town; the bustle of the port, with
its commerce and shipping and seafaring life huddled close in under the
hill; the many desolate streets of the Lower Town, as black and ruinous
as the last great fire left them; and the marshy meadows beyond,
memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of Cartier and Montcalm.

They went to the chapel of the Seminary at Laval University, and admired
the Le Brun, and the other paintings of less merit, but equal interest
through their suggestion of a whole dim religious world of paintings;
and then they spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so much in
looking at the Crucifixion by Vandyck which is there, as in reveling
amid the familiar rococo splendors of the temple. Every swaggering
statue of a saint, every rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those that
on the carven and gilded clouds above the high altar float--

"Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,"--

was precious to them; the sacristan dusting the sacred properties with a
feather brush, and giving each shrine a business-like nod as he passed,
was as a long-lost brother; they had hearts of aggressive tenderness for
the young girls and old women who stepped in for