ave believed themselves in the farthest Catholic South, but for the two
great porcelain stoves that stood on either side of the nave near the
entrance, and that too vividly reminded them of the possibility of cold.

In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and other confusions of the
South and North, and one never quite reconciles himself to them. The
Frenchmen, who expected to find there the climate of their native land,
and ripen her wines in as kindly a sun, have perpetuated the image of
home in so many things, that it goes to the heart with a painful emotion
to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon them. As you ponder some
characteristic aspect of Quebec,--a bit of street with heavy stone houses
opening upon a stretch of the city wall, with a Lombardy poplar rising
slim against it,--you say, to your satisfied soul, "Yes, it is the real
thing!" and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky strikes in upon
you, and makes the reality a mere picture. The sky is blue, the sun is
often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that the pathetic
radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness that summer is but
hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit at the first
dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before the snow. But
somehow, from without or from within, that light of the North is there.

It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the little circular garden
near Durham Terrace, where every brightness of fall flowers
abounded,--marigold, coxcomb, snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and
sunflower. It was a substantial and hardy efflorescence, and they fancied
that fainter-hearted plants would have pined away in that garden, where
the little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light, fell back again
with a musical shiver. The consciousness of this latent cold, of winter
only held in abeyance by the bright sun, was not deeper even in the once
magnificent, now neglected Governor's Garden, where there was actually a
rawness in the late afternoon air, and whither they were strolling for
the view from its height, and to pay their duty to the obelisk raised
there to the common fame of Wolfe and Montcalm. The sounding Latin
inscription celebrates the royal governor-general who erected it almost
as much as the heroes to whom it was raised; but these spectators did not
begrudge the space given to his praise, for so fine a thought merited
praise. It enforced again the idea of a kind