sawing wood and picking up chips to boil the
teakettle. They are off dignity as well as off duty, then; but when
they are on both, and in full dress, they make our volunteers (as I
remember them) seem very shabby and slovenly.

Over the belfry of the Barracks, our windows command a view of half
Quebec, with its roofs and spires dropping down the slope to the
Lower Town, where the masts of the ships in the river come tapering
up among them, and then of the plain stretching from the river in the
valley to a range of mountains against the horizon, with far-off
white villages glimmering out of their purple folds. The whole plain
is bright with houses and harvest-fields; and the distinctly divided
farms--the owners cut them up every generation, and give each son a
strip of the entire length--run back on either hand, from the
straight roads bordered by poplars, while the highways near the city
pass between lovely villas.

But this landscape and the Jesuit Barracks, with all their merits,
are nothing to the Ursuline Convent, just under our back windows,
which I told you something about in my other letter. We have been
reading up its history since, and we know about Madame de la Peltrie,
the noble Norman lady who founded it in 1640. She was very rich and
very beautiful, and a saint from the beginning, so that when her
husband died, and her poor old father wanted her to marry again and
not go into a nunnery, she didn't mind cheating him by a sham
marriage with a devout gentleman; and she came to Canada as soon as
her father was dead, with another saint, Marie de l'Incarnation, and
founded this convent. The first building is standing yet, as strong
as ever, though everything but the stone walls was burnt two
centuries ago. Only a few years since an old ash-tree, under which
the Ursulines first taught the Indian children, blew down, and now a
large black cross marks its place. The modern nuns are in the garden
nearly the whole morning long, and by night the ghosts of the former
nuns haunt it; and in very bright moonlight I myself do a bit of
Madame de la Peltrie there, and teach little Indian boys, who dwindle
like those in the song, as the moon goes down. It is an enchanted
place, and I wish we had it in the back yard at Eriecreek, though I
don't think the neighbors would approve of the arch