it be nursed and
nurtured there. So when we go into an empty church, it is--empty.
Hopes, fears, purposes, ambitions, the eager hours of men, do not
pervade and penetrate those courts. The walls do not flame with the
fire of burning hearts. The white intensity of life may never have
glowed within them. No fragrance of intimate, elemental passion
lingers still. No fine aroma of being clings through the years and
suffuses you with its impalpable sweetness, its subtile strength. You
are not awed, because the Awful is not there. But on the battle-field
you have no doubt. Imagination roams at will, but in the domains of
faith. Realities have been there, and their ghosts walk up and down
forever. There men met men in deadly earnest. Right or wrong, they
stood face to face with the unseen, the inevitable. The great problem
awaited them, and they bent fiery souls to its solution. But one idea
moved them all and wholly. They threw themselves body and soul into
the raging furnace. All minor distractions were burned out. Every
self was fused and lost in one single molten flood, dashing madly
against its barrier to whelm in rapturous victory or be broken in sore
defeat.

And it is earnestness that utilizes the good. It is sincerity that
makes the bad not infernal.

Monday gave us the Indian village, more Indian-y than village-y,--and
the Falls of Lorette. For a description, see the Falls of Montmorency.
Lorette is more beautiful, I think, more wild, more varied, more
sympathetic,--not so precipitous, not so concentrated, not so forceful,
but more picturesque, poetic, sylvan, lovely. The descent is long,
broad, and broken. The waters flash and foam over the black rocks like
a white lace veil over an Ethiop belle, and then rush on to other
woodland scenes.

We left Quebec ignobly, crossing the river in a steamer to which the
eminently English adjective nasty can fitly apply,--a wheezy,
sputtering, black, crazy old craft, muddy enough throughout to have
been at the bottom of the river and sucked up again half a dozen times.
With care of the luggage, shawls, hackmen, and tickets, we all
contrived to become separated, and I found myself crushed into one
corner of a little Black Hole of Calcutta, with no chair to sit in, no
space to stand in, and no air to breathe, on the sultriest day that
Canada had known for years. What windows there were opened by swinging
inwards and upwards, which they could not do for the pr