unquelled, though the grasp of
Time is on its throat, silent, mighty, irresistible.

Montmorency,--Montmorenci,--sweet and storied name! You, too, have
received the awful baptism. Blood has mingled with your sacrifices.
The song of your wild waves has been lost in the louder thunders of
artillery, and the breezes sweeping through these green woods have
soothed the agonies of dying men. Into one heart this ancient name,
heavy with a weight of disaster and fancied disgrace, sank down like
lead,--a burden which only death could cast off, only victory destroy;
and death came hand in hand with victory.

Driving home, we take more special note of what interested us
aggressively before,--Lord Elgin's residence,--the house occupied by
the Duke of Kent when a young man in the army here, long I suppose
before the throne of England placed itself at the end of his vista.
Did the Prince of Wales, I wonder, visit this place, and, sending away
his retinue, walk slowly alone under the shadows of these sombre trees,
striving to bring back that far-off past, and some vague outline of the
thoughts, the feelings, the fears and fancies of his grandfather, then,
like himself, a young man, but, not like himself, a fourth son, poor
and an exile, with no foresight probably of the exaltation that awaited
his line,--his only child to be not only the lady of his land, but our
lady of the world,--a warm-hearted woman worthily seated on the proud
throne of Britain,--a noble and great-souled woman, in whose sorrow
nations mourn, for whose happiness nations pray,--whose name is never
spoken in this far-off Western world but with a silent blessing.
Another low-roofed, many-roomed, rambling old house I stand up in the
carriage to gaze at lingeringly with longing, misty eyes,--the sometime
home of Field Marshal the Marquis de Montcalm. Writing now of this in
the felt darkness that pours up from abandoned Fredericksburg, fearing
not what the South may do in its exultation, but what the North may do
in its despondency, I understand, as I understood not then, nor ever
before, what comfort came to the dying hero in the certain thought, "I
shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec."

Now again we draw near the city whose thousands of silver (or perhaps
tin) roofs dazzle our eyes with their resplendence, and I have an
indistinct impression of having been several times packed out and in to
see sundry churches, of which I remember nothing except that I