a half-hour's devotion,
and for the men with bourgeois or peasant faces, who stole a moment from
affairs and crops, and gave it to the saints. There was nothing in the
place that need remind them of America, and its taste was exactly that
of a thousand other churches of the eighteenth century. They could
easily have believed themselves in the farthest Catholic South, but for
the two great porcelain stoves that stood on either side of the nave
near the entrance, and that too vividly reminded them of the possibility
of cold.

In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and other confusions of the
South and North, and one never quite reconciles himself to them. The
Frenchmen, who expected to find there the climate of their native land,
and ripen her wines in as kindly a sun, have perpetuated the image of
home in so many things, that it goes to the heart with a painful emotion
to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon them. As you ponder
some characteristic aspect of Quebec,--a bit of street with heavy stone
houses opening upon a stretch of the city wall, with a Lombardy poplar
rising slim against it,--you say, to your satisfied soul, "Yes, it
is the real thing!" and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky
strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a mere picture. The sky is
blue, the sun is often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that
the pathetic radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness that
summer is but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit
at the first dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before
the snow. But somehow, from without or from within, that light of the
North is there.

It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the little circular
garden near Durham Terrace, where every brightness of fall flowers
abounded,--marigold, coxcomb, snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and
sunflower. It was a substantial and hardy efflorescence, and they
fancied that fainter-hearted plants would have pined away in that
garden, where the little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light,
fell back again with a musical shiver. The consciousness of this latent
cold, of winter only held in abeyance by the bright sun, was not deeper
even in the once magnificent, now neglected Governor's Garden, where
there was actually a rawness in the late afternoon air, and whither they
were strolling for the view from its height, and to pay their duty to
the obelisk raised there to