ywhere that day; but after church they
found themselves with the loveliest afternoon of their stay at Quebec to
be passed somehow, and it was a pity to pass it indoors, the colonel
said at their early dinner. They canvassed the attractions of the
different drives out of town, and they decided upon that to Lorette. The
Ellisons had already been there, but Mr. Arbuton had not, and it was
from a dim motive of politeness towards him that Mrs. Ellison chose the
excursion; though this did not prevent her from wondering aloud
afterward, from time to time, why she had chosen it. He was restless and
absent, and answered at random when points of the debate were referred
to him, but he eagerly assented to the conclusion, and was in haste to
set out.

The road to Lorette is through St. John's Gate, down into the outlying
meadows and rye-fields, where, crossing and recrossing the swift St.
Charles, it finally rises at Lorette above the level of the citadel. It
is a lonelier road than that to Montmorenci, and the scattering cottages
upon it have not the well-to-do prettiness, the operatic repair, of
stone-built Beauport. But they are charming, nevertheless, and the
people seem to be remoter from modern influences. Peasant-girls, in
purple gowns and broad straw hats, and not the fashions of the year
before last, now and then appeared to our acquaintance; near one ancient
cottage an old man, in the true habitant's red woollen cap with a long
fall, leaned over the bars of his gate and smoked a short pipe.

By and by they came to Jeune-Lorette, an almost ideally pretty hamlet,
bordering the road on either hand with galleried and balconied little
houses, from which the people bowed to them as they passed, and piously
enclosing in its midst the village church and churchyard. They soon
after reached Lorette itself, which they might easily have known for an
Indian town by its unkempt air, and the irregular attitudes in which the
shabby cabins lounged along the lanes that wandered through it, even if
the Ellisons had not known it already, or if they had not been welcomed
by a pomp of Indian boys and girls of all shades of darkness. The girls
had bead-wrought moccasins and work-bags to sell, and the boys bore bows
and arrows and burst into loud cries of "Shoot! shoot! grand shoot!
Put-up-pennies! shoot-the-pennies! Grand shoot!" When they recognized
the colonel, as they did after the party had dismounted in front of the
church, they renewed t