Quebec, and passengers bound for the
English settlements south of that city were obliged to change.

For a few minutes before the train stopped the Rexford family had been
booted and spurred, so to speak, ready for the transfer. Each young
person was warmly buttoned up and tied into a warlike-looking muffler.
Each had several packages in charge. A youth came in from the
smoking-car and attached himself to them. When the train had come to a
standstill the little French conductor was energetic in helping them to
descend.

The family was very large, and, moreover, it was lively; its members
were as hard to count as chickens of a brood. Sophia, holding the
youngest child and the tickets, endeavoured to explain their number to
the conductor.

"There are three children that go free," she said. "Then two little boys
at half fare--that makes one ticket. Myself and three young ladies--make
five tickets; my brother and father and mother--eight."

The sharp Frenchman looked dubious. "Three children free; two at half
fare," he repeated. He was trying to see them all as he spoke.

Sophia repeated her count with terse severity.

"There was not another young lady?"

"Certainly not."

And Sophia was not a woman to be trifled with, so he punched the tickets
and went back into his car.

Wooden platforms, a station hotel built of wood, innumerable lines of
black rails on which freight trains stood idle, the whole place shut in
by a high wooden fence--this was the prospect which met the eyes of the
English travellers, and seen in the first struggling light of morning,
in the bitter cold of a black frost, it was not a cheerful one. The
Rexford family, however, were not considering the prospect; they were
intent only on finding the warm passenger-car of the train that was to
take them the rest of their journey, and which they had been assured
would be waiting here to receive them.

This train, however, was not immediately to be seen, and, in the
meantime, the broad platform, which was dusted over with dry frost
crystals, was the scene of varied activities.

From the baggage-car of the train they had left, a great number of boxes
and bags, labelled "Rexford," were being thrown down in a violent
manner, which greatly distressed some of the girls and their father.

"Not that way. That is not the way. Don't you know that is not the way
boxes should be handled?" shouted Captain Rexford sternly, and then,
seeing that no one paid th