ercial houses and nearly all the mud of the city.

At the end of this olden quarter, merging from the very air of
antiquity in the streets, Quebec, with a characteristic Canadian
gesture, adopts modernity. That is the vivid thing about the city. It
is not merely historical: it is up-to-date. It is not merely the past,
but it is the future also. At the end of the old, cramped streets
stands Quebec's future--its docks.

These great dockyards at the very toe of the cape are the latest things
of their kind. They have been built to take the traffic of tomorrow as
well as today. Greater ships than those yet built can lie in safe
water alongside the huge new concrete quays. Great ships can go into
dry dock here, or across the water in the shipyards of Levis. They
even build or put together ships of large tonnage, and while we were
there, there were ships in half sections; by themselves too big to be
floated down from the lakes through the locks, they had come down from
the building slips in floatable halves to be riveted together in Quebec.

A web of railways serves these great harbour basins, and the latest
mechanical loading gear can whip cargo out of ships or into them at
record speed and with infinite ease. Huge elevators--one concrete
monster that had been reared in a Canadian hustle of seven days--can
stream grain by the million tons into holds, while troops, passengers
and the whole mechanics of human transport can be handled with the
greatest facility.

The Prince went up the steep cobbled street of The Mountain under the
grey, solid old masonry of the Battery that hangs over the town in
front of Laval University, that with the Archbishop's palace looks like
a piece of old France translated bodily to Canada.

So he came to the big, green Place des Armes, not now a place of arms,
and at that particular moment not green, but as thick as a gigantic
flower-bed with the pretty dresses of pretty women--and there is all
the French charm in the beauty of the women of Quebec--and with the
khaki and commonplace of soldiers and civilians. A mighty and
enthusiastic crowd that did not allow its French accent to hinder the
shout of welcome it had caught up from the throng that lined the slopes
of The Mountain.

From this point the route twisted to the right along the Grande Allee,
going first between tall and upright houses, jalousied and severe
faced, to where a strip of side road swung it left again, and up hill
t