he foot of the rock, and crept, populous and picturesque, up its sides;
from the massive citadel on its crest flew the red banner of Saint
George, and along its brow swept the gray wall of the famous, heroic,
beautiful city, overtopped by many a gleaming spire and antique roof.

Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, modern world the vessel
steamed up to this city of an olden time and another ideal,--to her who
was a lady from the first, devout and proud and strong, and who still,
after two hundred and fifty years, keeps perfect the image and memory of
the feudal past from which she sprung. Upon her height she sits unique;
and when you say Quebec, having once beheld her, you invoke a sense of
medieval strangeness and of beauty which the name of no other city could
intensify.

As they drew near the steamboat wharf they saw, swarming over a broad
square, a market beside which the Bonsecours Market would have shown as
common as the Quincy, and up the odd wooden-sidewalked street stretched
an aisle of carriages and those high swung calashes, which are to Quebec
what the gondolas are to Venice. But the hand of destiny was upon our
tourists, and they rode up town in an omnibus. They were going to
the dear old Hotel Musty in Street, wanting which Quebec is not to be
thought of without a pang. It is now closed, and Prescott Gate, through
which they drove into the Upper Town, has been demolished since the
summer of last year. Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road, by
those Quebec horses which expect to gallop up hill whatever they do
going down, they turned a corner of the towering weed-grown rock, and
shot in under the low arch of the gate, pierced with smaller doorways
for the foot-passengers. The gloomy masonry dripped with damp, the doors
were thickly studded with heavy iron spikes; old cannon, thrust endwise
into the ground at the sides of the gate, protected it against
passing wheels. Why did not some semi-forbidding commissary of police,
struggling hard to overcome his native politeness, appear and demand
their passports? The illusion was otherwise perfect, and it needed but
this touch. How often in the adored Old World, which we so love and
disapprove, had they driven in through such gates at that morning
hour! On what perverse pretext, then, was it not some ancient town of
Normandy?

"Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and they'd soon rattle this
old wall down and let in a little fresh air!" said a