nd social, their literary
and domestic life are concerned. They share faithfully in the national
development, and honourably serve the welfare of the whole
Dominion--sometimes with a too careful and unsympathetic reserve--but
within their own beloved province they retain as zealously and more
jealously than the most devoted Highland men their language and their
customs, and faithfully conserve the civil laws which mark them off as
clearly from the English provinces as Jersey and Guernsey are
distinguished from the United Kingdom. They have changed little with
the passing years, and their city has changed less. In many respects
the Quebec of to-day is the Quebec of yesterday. Time and science have
altered its detail, but viewed from afar it seems to have altered as
little as Heidelberg and Coblenz. Lower Town huddles in artistic chaos
at the foot of the sheltering cliff, and, as aforetime, the
overhanging fort protrudes its protecting muzzles. Spires and antique
minarets which looked down upon a French settlement struggling with
foes in feathers and war-paint, still gleam from the towering rock on
which their stable foundations are laid; and after five sieges and the
passing of two and a half centuries the mother city of the continent
remains a faithful survivor of an heroic age, on historic ground
sacred to the valour of two great races.

OLD QUEBEC

CHAPTER I

EARLY VOYAGES

Living in the twentieth century, to which the uttermost parts of the
earth are revealed, and with only the undiscovered poles left to lure
us on, we cannot fully appreciate the geographical ignorance of the
Middle Ages. The travels of Marco Polo had only lately revealed the
wonders of the golden East, and in the West the Pillars of Hercules
marked earth's furthest bound. Beyond lay the _mare tenebrosum_, the
Mysterious Sea, girding the level world. England was not then one of
the first nations of the earth. She was not yet a maritime power, she
had not begun the work of colonisation and empire: the fulcrum of
Europe lay further south. But as our Tudor sovereigns were making
secure dominion in "these isles," the Byzantine Empire was moving
slowly to its end, and favouring circumstances were already making
Italy the centre of the world's commerce and culture. There the feudal
system, never deeply rooted, was declining slowly, and Italian energy
and enterprise now having larger opportunity, seized the commerce of
the East as it rec