l nations,
but chiefly Americans, with some French Canadians. The former gathered
on the forward promenade, enjoying what little of the landscape the
growing night left visible, and the latter made society after their
manner in the saloon. They were plain-looking men and women, mostly,
and provincial, it was evident, to their inmost hearts; provincial in
origin, provincial by inheritance, by all their circumstances, social
and political. Their relation with France was not a proud one, but it
was not like submersion by the slip-slop of English colonial loyalty;
yet they seem to be troubled by no memories of their hundred years'
dominion of the land that they rescued from, the wilderness, and that
was wrested from them by war. It is a strange fate for any people thus
to have been cut off from the parent-country, and abandoned to whatever
destiny their conquerors chose to reserve for them; and if each of the
race wore the sadness and strangeness of that fate in his countenance it
would not be wonderful. Perhaps it is wonderful that none of them
shows anything of the kind. In their desertion they have multiplied and
prospered; they may have a national grief, but they hide it well; and
probably they have none.

Later, one of them appeared to Isabel in the person of the pale, slender
young ecclesiastic who had shown her and Basil the pictures in the
country church. She was confessing to the priest, and she was not at all
surprised to find that he was Basil in a suit of medieval armor. He had
an immense cross on his shoulder.

"To get this cross to the top of the mountain," thought Isabel, "we must
have two horses. Basil," she added, aloud, "we must have two horses!"

"Ten, if you like, my dear," answered his voice, cheerfully, "though I
think we'd better ride up in the omnibus."

She opened her eyes, and saw him smiling.

"We're in sight of Quebec," he said. "Come out as soon as you can,--come
out into the seventeenth century."

IX. QUEBEC.

Isabel hurried out upon the forward promenade, where all the other
passengers seemed to be assembled, and beheld a vast bulk of gray and
purple rock, swelling two hundred feet up from the mists of the river,
and taking the early morning light warm upon its face and crown.
Black-hulked, red-illumined Liverpool steamers, gay river-craft and
ships of every sail and flag, filled the stream athwart which the
ferries sped their swift traffic-laden shuttles; a lower town hung to
t