bed Jesuits, the high-born, delicately nurtured, and devoted
nuns, and the steel-clad soldiers of his train, kneeling about the altar
raised there in the wilderness, and silent amidst the silence of nature
at the lifted Host.

He painted a semblance of all this for Isabel, using the colors of the
historian who has made these scenes the beautiful inheritance of all
dream era, and sketched the battles, the miracles, the sufferings, and
the penances through which the pious colony was preserved and prospered,
till they both grew impatient of modern Montreal, and would fain have
had the ancient Villemarie back in its place.

"Think of Maisonneuve, dearest, climbing in midwinter to the top of the
mountain there, under a heavy cross set with the bones of saints,
and planting it on the summit, in fulfillment of a vow to do so if
Villemarie were saved from the freshet; and then of Madame de la Peltrie
romantically receiving the sacrament there, while all Villemarie fell
down adoring! Ah, that was a picturesque people! When did ever a Boston
governor climb to the top of Beacon hill in fulfillment of a vow? To be
sure, we may yet see a New York governor doing something of the kind--if
he can find a hill. But this ridiculous column to Nelson, who never had
anything to do with Montreal," he continued; "it really seems to me the
perfect expression of snobbish colonial dependence and sentimentality,
seeking always to identify itself with the mother-country, and ignoring
the local past and its heroic figures. A column to Nelson in Jacques
Cartier Square, on the ground that was trodden by Champlain, and won for
its present masters by the death of Wolfe."

The boat departed on her trip to Quebec. During supper they were
served by French waiters, who, without apparent English of their own,
miraculously understood that of the passengers, except in the case
of the furious gentleman who wanted English breakfast tea; to so much
English as that their inspiration did not reach, and they forced him to
compromise on coffee. It was a French boat, owned by a French company,
and seemed to be officered by Frenchmen throughout; certainly, as our
tourists in the joy of their good appetites affirmed, the cook was of
that culinarily delightful nation.

The boat was almost as large as those of the Hudson, but it was not so
lavishly splendid, though it had everything that could minister to the
comfort and self-respect of the passengers. These were of al