right sacks
and kirtles were no more. "O, you'd see them on weekdays, sir," was
the answer, "but they're not so plenty any time as they used to be." He
opened his store of facts about the habitans, whom he praised for every
virtue,--for thrift, for sobriety, for neatness, for amiability; and his
words ought to have had the greater weight, because he was of the Irish
race, between which and the Canadians there is no kindness lost. But the
looks of the passers-by corroborated him, and as for the little houses,
open-doored beside the way, with the pleasant faces at window and
portal, they were miracles of picturesqueness and cleanliness. From each
the owner's slim domain, narrowing at every successive division among
the abundant generations, runs back to hill or river in well-defined
lines, and beside the cottage is a garden of pot-herbs, bordered with a
flame of bright autumn flowers; somewhere in decent seclusion grunts
the fattening pig, which is to enrich all those peas and onions for the
winter's broth; there is a cheerfulness of poultry about the barns; I
dare be sworn there is always a small girl driving a flock of decorous
ducks down the middle of the street; and of the priest with a book under
his arm, passing a way-side shrine, what possible doubt? The houses,
which are of one model, are built by the peasants themselves with the
stone which their land yields more abundantly than any other crop, and
are furnished with galleries and balconies to catch every ray of the
fleeting summer, and perhaps to remember the long-lost ancestral summers
of Normandy. At every moment, in passing through this ideally neat and
pretty village, our tourists must think of the lovely poem of which all
French Canada seems but a reminiscence and illustration. It was Grand
Pre, not Beauport; and they paid an eager homage to the beautiful genius
which has touched those simple village aspects with an undying charm,
and which, whatever the land's political allegiance, is there perpetual
Seigneur.

The village, stretching along the broad interval of the St. Lawrence,
grows sparser as you draw near the Falls of Montmorenci, and presently
you drive past the grove shutting from the road the country-house in
which the Duke of Kent spent some merry days of his jovial youth, and
come in sight of two lofty towers of stone,--monuments and witnesses of
the tragedy of Montmorenci.

Once a suspension-bridge, built sorely against the will of the
neighbo