Count Frontenac and his splendid successors of the French regime.
The castle went the way of Quebec by fire some forty years ago, and Lord
Durham leveled the site and made it a public promenade. A stately arcade
of solid masonry supports it on the brink of the rock, and an iron
parapet incloses it; there are a few seats to lounge upon, and some idle
old guns for the children to clamber over and play with. A soft twilight
had followed the day, and there was just enough obscurity to hide from a
willing eye the Northern and New World facts of the scene, and to bring
into more romantic relief the citadel dark against the mellow evening,
and the people gossiping from window to window across the narrow streets
of the Lower Town. The Terrace itself was densely thronged, and there
was a constant coming and going of the promenaders, who each formally
paced back and forth upon the planking for a certain time, and then went
quietly home, giving place to the new arrivals. They were nearly all
French, and they were not generally, it seemed, of the first fashion,
but rather of middling condition in life; the English being represented
only by a few young fellows and now and then a redfaced old gentleman
with an Indian scarf trailing from his hat. There were some fair
American costumes and faces in the crowd, but it was essentially
Quebecian. The young girls walking in pairs, or with their lovers,
had the true touch of provincial unstylishness, the young men the
ineffectual excess of the second-rate Latin dandy, their elders the rich
inelegance of a bourgeoisie in their best. A few, better-figured avocats
or notaires (their profession was as unmistakable as if they had carried
their well-polished brass doorplates upon their breasts) walked and
gravely talked with each other. The non-American character of the
scene was not less vividly marked in the fact that each person dressed
according to his own taste and frankly indulged private preferences
in shapes and colors. One of the promenaders was in white, even to
his canvas shoes; another, with yet bolder individuality, appeared in
perfect purple. It had a strange, almost portentous effect when these
two startling figures met as friends and joined each other in the
promenade with linked arms; but the evening was already beginning to
darken round them, and presently the purple comrade was merely a sombre
shadow beside the glimmering white.

The valleys and the heights now vanished; but the