ures,--is
there anything else? Yes, the apple that Eve ate, transfixed to
oak,--hard to understood, but seeing is believing. And then past
Nelson's monument, somewhat battered, like the hero whom it
commemorates; past the Champ de Mars, a fine parade-ground, hard and
smooth as a floor; past the barracks and the reservoir, to the new
Court-House, massive and plain. Then home to dinner and lounging; then
travelling-dresses, and the steamer, and a most lovely sunset on the
river; and then a night of tranquillity running to fog, and a morning
approach to the unique city of North America,--the first and the only
walled city _I_ ever saw, or you either, I dare say, if you would only
be willing to confess it. The aspect of the city, as one first
approaches it, is utterly strange and foreign,--a high promontory
jutting into the river, with a shelf of squalid, crowded, tall and
shaky, or low and squatty tenements at its base, almost standing on the
water and rising behind them, for the back of the shelf, a rough, steep
precipice abutted with the solid masonry of wall and citadel. A board
fastened somehow about half-way up the rocky cliff, inscribed with the
name of Montgomery, marks the spot where a hero, a patriot, a
gentleman, met his death. Disembarking, we wind along a stair of a
road, up steep ascents, and enter in through the gates into the
city,--the walled, upper city,--walls thick, impregnable, gates
ponderous, inert, burly. You did well enough in your day, old foes;
but with Armstrongs and iron-clads, and Ericsson still living, where
would you be?--answer me that. Quaint, odd, alien old city,--a faint
phantasmagoria of past conflicts and forgotten plans, a dingy fragment
of la belle France, a clinging reminiscence of England, a dim, stone
dream of Edinburgh, a little flutter of modern fashion, planted upon a
sturdy rampart of antiquity, a little cobweb of commerce and
enterprise, netting over a great deal of church and priest and king
with an immovable basis of stolid existence,--that is the Quebec I
inferred from the Quebec I saw. Nothing in it was so interesting to me
as itself. But passing by itself for the nonce, we prudently took
advantage of the fine morning, and drove out to the Falls of
Montmorency with staring eyes that wanted to take in all views, before,
behind, on this side and that, at once; and because we could not, the
joints of my neck at least became so dry with incessant action that
they almo