iness-suited, modern world the vessel
steamed up to this city of an olden time and another ideal,--to her who
was a lady from the first, devout and proud and strong, and who still,
after two hundred and fifty years, keeps perfect the image and memory of
the feudal past from which she sprung. Upon her height she sits unique;
and when you say Quebec, having once beheld her, you invoke a sense of
medieval strangeness and of beauty which the name of no other city could
intensify.

As they drew near the steamboat wharf they saw, swarming over a broad
square, a market beside which the Bonsecours Market would have shown as
common as the Quincy, and up the odd wooden-sidewalked street stretched
an aisle of carriages and those high swung calashes, which are to Quebec
what the gondolas are to Venice. But the hand of destiny was upon our
tourists, and they rode up town in an omnibus. They were going to the
dear old Hotel Musty in Street, wanting which Quebec is not to be thought
of without a pang. It is now closed, and Prescott Gate, through which
they drove into the Upper Town, has been demolished since the summer of
last year. Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road, by those Quebec
horses which expect to gallop up hill whatever they do going down, they
turned a corner of the towering weed-grown rock, and shot in under the
low arch of the gate, pierced with smaller doorways for the
foot-passengers. The gloomy masonry dripped with damp, the doors were
thickly studded with heavy iron spikes; old cannon, thrust endwise into
the ground at the sides of the gate, protected it against passing wheels.
Why did not some semi-forbidding commissary of police, struggling hard to
overcome his native politeness, appear and demand their passports? The
illusion was otherwise perfect, and it needed but this touch. How often
in the adored Old World, which we so love and disapprove, had they driven
in through such gates at that morning hour! On what perverse pretext,
then, was it not some ancient town of Normandy?

"Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and they'd soon rattle this
old wall down and let in a little fresh air!" said a patriotic voice at
Isabel's elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow irregular
streets, the huddling gables, the quaint roofs, through which and under
which they drove on to the hotel.

As they dashed into a broad open square, "Here is the French Cathedral;
there is the Upper Town Market; yonder are