oung pine-trees, and flaunting with banners temporarily
constructed out of all available pieces of dry-goods, lent by the
devoted shop-keepers of the olden Church. Most extraordinary lithographs
of holy personages are hung out upon the door-posts and walls of every
house. Bowers shading curious little shrines meet the eye everywhere.
The white tables of the little shrines are loaded with gilt and
tinselled offerings in immense variety. Curious bosses, like
lace-pillows got up for church, swing pendent from the verdant
pine-branches. The vast parish-church, of sombre gray masonry, flashing
carnival-fires from the tin-plated pepper-boxes and slopes of its acre
of roof, is receiving or disgorging a variegated multitude of good
Catholics. Within, it is a mass of foliage, a wilderness of shrines, a
cloud-land of incense. Long processions of maidens all in white, and
others of maidens all in pale watchet-blue, are threading the principal
streets. They are not _all_ very religious maidens, I am afraid;
because, as sure as fate, one very young one of those robed in pure
white "made eyes" at me as she passed. Now all this display in Quebec
and its suburbs is set forth on a great scale and with bewildering
turmoil; but if you want to see it in miniature presentment, you must
pass down through St. Roch, and take the road to Lorette. Arrived among
the _sauvages_,--for so the Canadian _habitant_ invariably calls
his Indian brother, who is often as like him as one pea is like
another,--you will there see the little old Huron church decked out in
humble imitation of its younger, but bigger brothers in the city. The
lanes between the log-houses are embowered in a modest way, and the
drapery is eked out by many a yellow flannel petticoat and pair of
scarlet leggings that dally riotously with each other in the breeze. The
shrines are certainly less magnificent than those fairy bowers of
the elf-land St. Roch, but there is a good deal of beaded peltry and
bark-work about them, giving them, in a small way, the character of
aboriginal bazaars. The Hurons are _bons Catholiques_, and everything
connected with the _fete_ is conducted with a solemnity becoming the
character of the Christian red man. So decorous, indeed, are the little
_sauvagesses_ forming the miniature processions, that I do not remember
ever detecting the eyes of any of them wandering and wantoning around,
like those of the naughty little processional in white about whose
cond