rawl array for shelter into
little hollows, and behind gushes and fallen trees! Did he, whose soul
was so full of noble and sublime impulses, die here, shot through like
some ravening beast? The loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din
of arms, the cries of victory,--I vainly strive to conjure up some image
of it all now; and God be thanked, horrible spectre! that, fill the world
with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still remainest incredible in its moments
of sanity and peace. Least credible art thou on the old battle-fields,
where the mother of the race denies thee with breeze and sun and leaf and
bird, and every blade of grass! The red stain in Basil's thought yielded
to the rain sweeping across the pasture-land from which it had long since
faded, and the words on the monument, "Here died Wolfe victorious," did
not proclaim his bloody triumph over the French, but his self-conquest,
his victory over fear and pain and love of life. Alas! when shall the
poor, blind, stupid world honor those who renounce self in the joy of
their kind, equally with those who devote themselves through the anguish
and loss of thousands? So old a world and groping still!

The tourists were better fitted for the next occasion of sentiment, which
was at the Hotel Dieu whither they went after returning from the
battlefield. It took all the mal-address of which travellers are masters
to secure admittance, and it was not till they had rung various wrong
bells, and misunderstood many soft nun-voices speaking French through
grated doors, and set divers sympathetic spectators doing ineffectual
services, that they at last found the proper entrance, and were answered
in English that the porter would ask if they might see the chapel. They
hoped to find there the skull of Brebeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs who
perished long ago for the conversion of a race that has perished, and
whose relics they had come, fresh from their reading of Parkman, with
some vague and patronizing intention to revere. An elderly sister with a
pale, kind face led them through a ward of the hospital into the chapel,
which they found in the expected taste, and exquisitely neat and cool,
but lacking the martyr's skull. They asked if it were not to be seen.
"Ah, yes, poor Pere Brebeuf!" sighed the gentle sister, with the tone and
manner of having lost him yesterday; "we had it down only last week,
showing it to some Jesuit fathers; but it's in the convent now, and isn't
to be see