o unworthy as this
groaning barbarian. He ran swiftly about from object to object, rapidly
lecturing their inattention. "It is now time to go up into the tower,"
said he, and they gladly made that toilsome ascent, though it is
doubtful if the ascent of towers is not too much like the ascent
of mountains ever to be compensatory. From the top of Notre Dame is
certainly to be had a prospect upon which, but for his fluttered nerves
and trembling muscles and troubled respiration, the traveller might well
look with delight, and as it is must behold with wonder. So far as the
eye reaches it dwells only upon what is magnificent. All the features
of that landscape are grand. Below you spreads the city, which has less
that is merely mean in it than any other city of our continent, and
which is everywhere ennobled by stately civic edifices, adorned by
tasteful churches, and skirted by full foliaged avenues of mansions and
villas. Behind it rises the beautiful mountain, green with woods and
gardens to its crest, and flanked on the east by an endless fertile
plain, and on the west by another expanse, through which the Ottawa
rushes, turbid and dark, to its confluence with the St. Lawrence. Then
these two mighty streams commingled flow past the city, lighting up
the vast Champaign country to the south, while upon the utmost southern
verge, as on the northern, rise the cloudy summits of far-off mountains.

As our travellers gazed upon all this grandeur, their hearts were
humbled to the tacit admission that the colonial metropolis was not only
worthy of its seat, but had traits of a solid prosperity not excelled
by any of the abounding and boastful cities of the Republic. Long before
they quitted Montreal they had rallied from this weakness, but they
delighted still to honor her superb beauty.

The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top with the names of those
who have climbed it, and most of these are Americans, who flock in great
numbers to Canada in summer. They modify its hotel life, and the objects
of interest thrive upon their bounty. Our friends met them at every
turn, and knew them at a glance from the native populations, who are
also easily distinguishable from each other. The French Canadians are
nearly always of a peasant-like commonness, or where they rise above
this have a bourgeois commonness of face and manner, and the English
Canadians are to be known from the many English sojourners by the effort
to look much more