y what scene-painting is to painting, and might have
borne close inspection no better. They seemed the best-humored people
in the world, and on the kindliest terms with each other. The waiters
shared their pleasant mood, and served them affectionately, and were
now and then invited to join in the gay talk which babbled on over
dislocated aspirates, and filled the air with a sentiment of vagabond
enjoyment, of the romantic freedom of violated convention, of something
Gil Blas-like, almost picaresque.

If they had needed explanation it would have been given by the
announcement in the office of the hotel that a troupe of British blondes
was then appearing in Quebec for one week only.

After dinner they took possession of the parlor, and while one strummed
fitfully upon the ailing hotel piano, the rest talked, and talked shop,
of course, as all of us do when several of a trade are got together.

"W'at," said the eldest of the dark-faced, black haired British blondes
of Jewish race,--"w'at are we going to give at Montrehal?"

"We're going to give 'Pygmalion,' at Montrehal," answered the British
blonde of American birth, good-humoredly burlesquing the erring h of her
sister.

"But we cahn't, you know," said the lady with the fringed forehead;
"Hagnes is gone on to New York, and there's nobody to do Wenus."

"Yes, you know," demanded the first speaker, "oo's to do Wenus?

"Bella's to do Wenus," said a third.

There was an outcry at this, and "'Ow ever would she get herself up for
'Venus?" and "W'at a guy she'll look!" and "Nonsense! Bella's too
'eavy for Venus!" came from different lively critics; and the debate
threatened to become too intimate for the public ear, when one of their
gentlemen came in and said, "Charley don't seem so well this afternoon."
On this the chorus changed its note, and at the proposal, "Poor Charley,
let 's go and cheer 'im hop a bit," the whole good-tempered company
trooped out of the parlor together.

Our tourists meant to give the rest of the afternoon to that sort of
aimless wandering to and fro about the streets which seizes a foreign
city unawares, and best develops its charm of strangeness. So they
went out and took their fill of Quebec with appetites keen through long
fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Montreal, and
impartially rejoiced in the crooked up-and-down hill streets; the
thoroughly French domestic architecture of a place that thus denied
having been Engl