t it all comes from the bakers; and only
think, girls, what a relief that would be! Do get Uncle Jack to
consider it _seriously_.
Since I began this letter the afternoon has worn away--the light from
the sunset on the mountains would glorify our supper-table without
extra charge, if we lived here--and the twilight has passed, and the
moon has come up over the gables and dormer-windows of the convent,
and looks into the garden so invitingly that I can't help joining
her. So I will put my writing by till to-morrow. The going-to-bed
bell has rung, and the red lights have vanished one by one from the
windows, and the nuns are asleep, and another set of ghosts is
playing in the garden with the copper-colored phantoms of the Indian
children of long ago. What! not Madame de la Peltrie? Oh! how do they
like those little fibs of yours up in heaven?
_Sunday afternoon._--As we were at the French cathedral last Sunday,
we went to the English to-day; and I could easily have imagined
myself in some church of Old England, hearing the royal family prayed
for, and listening to the pretty poor sermon delivered with such an
English _brogue_. The people, too, had such Englishy faces and such
queer little eccentricities of dress; the young lady that sang
contralto in the choir wore a scarf like a man's on her hat. The
cathedral isn't much, architecturally, I suppose, but it affected me
very solemnly, and I couldn't help feeling that it was as much a part
of British power and grandeur as the citadel itself. Over the
bishop's seat drooped the flag of a Crimean regiment, tattered by
time and battles, which was hung up here with great ceremonies, in
1860, when the Prince of Wales presented them with new colors; and up
in the gallery was a kind of glorified pew for royal highnesses and
governor-generals and so forth, to sit in when they are here. There
are tablets and monumental busts about the walls; and one to the
memory of the Duke of Lenox, the governor-general who died in the
middle of the last century from the bite of a fox; which seemed an
odd fate for a duke, and somehow made me very sorry for him.
Fanny, of course, couldn't go to church with me, and Dick got out of
it by lingering too late over the newspapers at the hotel, and so I
trudged off with our Bostonian, who is still with us here. I did
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