elinquent colonel, who had
just stepped round to the Hotel St. Louis and was to be back presently.
But the moment of his return passed; a quarter-hour of grace; a
half-hour of grim magnanimity,--and still no colonel. Mrs. Ellison began
by saying that it was perfectly abominable, and left herself, in a
greater extremity, with nothing more forcible to add than that it was
too provoking. "It's getting so late now," she said at last, "that it's
no use waiting any longer, if you mean to go at all, to-day; and to-day's
the only day you _can_ go. There, you'd better drive on without him. I
can't bear to have you miss it." And, thus adjured, the younger people
rose and went.

When the high-born Noel Brulart de Sillery, Knight of Malta and courtier
of Marie de Medicis, turned from the vanities of this world and became a
priest, Canada was the fashionable mission of the day, and the noble
neophyte signalized his self-renunciation by giving of his great wealth
for the conversion of the Indian heathen. He supplied the Jesuits with
money to maintain a religious establishment near Quebec; and the
settlement of red Christians took his musical name, which the region
still keeps. It became famous at once as the first residence of the
Jesuits and the nuns of the Hotel Dieu, who wrought and suffered for
religion there amidst the terrors of pestilence, Iroquois, and winter.
It was the scene of miracles and martyrdoms, and marvels of many kinds,
and the centre of the missionary efforts among the Indians. Indeed, few
events of the picturesque early history of Quebec left it untouched; and
it is worthy to be seen, no less for the wild beauty of the spot than
for its heroical memories. About a league from the city, where the
irregular wall of rock on which Quebec is built recedes from the river,
and a grassy space stretches between the tide and the foot of the woody
steep, the old mission and the Indian village once stood; and to this
day there yet stands the stalwart frame of the first Jesuit Residence,
modernized, of course, and turned to secular uses, but firm as of old,
and good for a century to come. All round is a world of lumber, and
rafts of vast extent cover the face of the waters in the ample
cove,--one of many that indent the shore of the St. Lawrence. A careless
village straggles along the roadside and the river's margin; huge
lumber-ships are loading for Europe in the stream; a town shines out of
the woods on the opposite shore; n