your
fiddle or you will get it crushed in the crowd."

"As if I did not know how to take care of my darling baby!" said Jean,
holding his violin high above his head. "It is my only child; it will
laugh or cry, and love and scold as I bid it, and make everybody else
do the same when I touch its heart-strings." Jean had brought his violin
under his arm, in place of a spade, to help build up the walls of the
city. He had never heard of Amphion, with his lyre, building up the
walls of Thebes; but Jean knew that in his violin lay a power of work
by other hands, if he played while they labored. "It lightened toil, and
made work go merrily as the bells of Tilly at a wedding," said he.

There was immense talk, with plenty of laughter and no thought of
mischief, among the crowd. The habitans of en haut and the habitans
of en bas commingled, as they rarely did, in a friendly way. Nor was
anything to provoke a quarrel said even to the Acadians, whose rude
patois was a source of merry jest to the better-speaking Canadians.

The Acadians had flocked in great numbers into Quebec on the seizure of
their Province by the English, sturdy, robust, quarrelsome fellows, who
went about challenging people in their reckless way,--Etions pas mon
maitre, monsieur?--but all were civil to-day, and tuques were pulled
off and bows exchanged in a style of easy politeness that would not have
shamed the streets of Paris.

The crowd kept increasing in the Rue Buade. The two sturdy beggars
who vigorously kept their places on the stone steps of the barrier, or
gateway, of the Basse Ville reaped an unusual harvest of the smallest
coin--Max Grimau, an old, disabled soldier, in ragged uniform, which he
had worn at the defence of Prague under the Marshal de Belleisle,
and blind Bartemy, a mendicant born--the former, loud-tongued and
importunate, the latter, silent and only holding out a shaking hand for
charity. No Finance Minister or Royal Intendant studied more earnestly
the problem how to tax the kingdom than Max and Blind Bartemy how to
toll the passers-by, and with less success, perhaps.

To-day was a red-letter day for the sturdy beggars, for the news
flew fast that an ovation of some popular kind was to be given to
the Bourgeois Philibert. The habitans came trooping up the rough
mountain-road that leads from the Basse Ville to the Upper Town; and
up the long stairs lined with the stalls of Basque pedlars--cheating,
loquacious varlets--which forme