Old Quebec, the city of Champlain

He will tell you the story of “Notre Dame des Victoires”; call upon you to admire “the Golden Dog,” that strange memento of a bitter private quarrel; take you to handsome Parliament Buildings, where, in niches in the façade, you will behold statues of the warriors Frontenac, Wolfe, Montcalm, De Lévis and De Salaberry, besides one of that notable Governor-General, the Earl of Elgin, who risked his popularity by giving his assent to a measure for compensating the sufferers by the Rebellion of 1837.

Close by the Parliament House is the great Drill Hall, for the use of the present-day citizen-soldiers of Quebec; and turning back, through the modern St. Louis Gate, which has replaced the portal through which the wounded Montcalm was swept by a rush of fugitives into the city to die, one comes to the site of the surgeon’s office where he breathed his last. Not far away there stood till 1889 another humble dwelling, where Montgomery’s corpse was prepared for burial. On the same street still stands the old Kent House—now a fascinating curiosity shop—once, towards the close of the eighteenth century, the town-residence of Queen Victoria’s father, then colonel of a regiment of Fusiliers stationed at Quebec. Some miles distant there is, by the way, another Kent House, where the Duke used to spend his summers on the heights from which the Montmorency takes its impetuous leap of two hundred and fifty feet to join the St. Lawrence. Quebec has also its Kent Gate, a modern structure, to commemorate the same prince, who, if he lacked opportunity to shine as a great military genius, at least succeeded in winning for himself a reputation as the strictest of disciplinarians.

But the military suggestions of Quebec are not confined to historic associations. You have them in concrete form, from the picturesque Citadel—which, however, was not built till long after the latest siege—to the little groups of cannon-balls, piled up in odd corners like a young giant’s marbles. At any turn you may meet a red-coated soldier or a blue-jacket from some visiting iron-clad; you may chance on a long row of obsolete guns, or on an ancient mortar, now powerless for mischief, with a great gag of iron in its throat; and here, there and everywhere you will find tablets or monuments marking the spots once deeply stained with the heart’s blood of the brave.

Yet, after all, this is but one aspect of Quebec, and not the brightest. To some persons the fair old town speaks more insistently of peace than of war; for so quaint is it, so old-world, that it seems, despite all evidence to the contrary, that here life must have run on undisturbed for centuries. To one brought up in another community, the unfamiliar figures of quaintly-garbed nuns, long-robed priests, and brothers in russet gowns, suggest the long-ago. The very markets, with all their bustle and hurry of eager life, seem survivals of the past.

A charm and a glamor hangs over the generally commonplace business of buying and selling, getting gain and making provision for the humble needs of the day. The whole thing seems like a picture-book. The groups of voluble, good-humored habitant women; the queer little carts like ladders mounted on wheels; the small pink pigs, squealing their hardest as they are transferred from the crates of the vendors to the sacks of the purchasers; the background of tall, irregular buildings climbing the great cliff—these lend to the scene a color and character all its own.

Wandering from stall to stall, heaped with vegetables, home-grown tobacco, dark slabs of maple sugar, home-woven towelling curtains or carpets, firmly knit socks, elaborately plaited mats, you begin to wonder at the patience and industry of this vivacious people, and you will wonder at these qualities still more if you see the habitant at home.

Go down, for instance, to Beaupré or St. Joachim, those parishes which Wolfe once so mercilessly harried. It is a fair and fruitful land, well-watered by the “full-fed river,” and over it now seems to brood the gentle angel of peace. Amongst the low curved roofs of the villages rise the towers of great churches, like that at Beauport and the miraculous St. Anne, whither every year come pilgrims in thousands seeking health or peace of mind. Behind these villages, if you step but a little aside from the splendid waterway of the St. Lawrence, you may lose yourself on sparsely-tracked, forest-covered hills, cleft with gullies, down which foam torrents, choked at times with thousands of grinding logs. But, after all, it is only a hermit who would long bury himself amongst these hills.

The winding roads below lead past barns with thatched roofs, log cow-houses with overhanging upper-storeys, cottages with projecting “galleries” and windows shaded with wall-paper, rugged stone houses with huge chimneys, “bake-ovens” under rude shelters of planks, drinking-troughs, wayside crosses, and flowery gardens, containing little shrines, within which glimmer tiny white images of the Virgin and her Son.

Along these roads comes the oddest assortment of vehicles ever seen, I should think, in one district of the Dominion. The habitant carries home his hay in a two-wheeled cart, fitted with a rack and drawn by a rough pony or a yoke of deliberate oxen; and he rides to church or market in a springless conveyance, which is a kind of grotesque compromise between a “top-buggy” and a “buckboard.” When coming from work, however, he contents himself with a humbler vehicle, rattling down the stony slopes at a surprising pace in a little cart drawn by a lean, rough-coated, stout-limbed dog.

A little farther along the same road you may see a stray automobile, while on the other side of the fence run the electric cars of the Quebec Railway Light & Power Company, or occasionally, on the same line, a train of “steam-cars.”

All the country near Quebec is well supplied now with railroads, and the townsfolk are learning to follow the modern fashion of living in country cottages during the summer months. Quebec merchants leave the city by the evening trains to spend their leisure hours with their families at Charlesbourg, Lorette, Montmorency, or some equally interesting but till lately inaccessible place. Others take the small modern steamboats which ply up and down the shores of the St. Lawrence, or to and from the beautiful Island of Orleans, and which have to make their way carefully past great rafts of lumber, fleet “ocean greyhounds,” or quaint barges of the same pattern as those used by Wolfe in his attack upon Quebec. These newcomers into the country bring new fashions, which in course of time will have their effect upon the habitants; but their influence is as yet scarcely perceptible.

Women in broad-brimmed straw hats are still seen in the hay-fields at work beside the men, yet they find time for much labor at loom and spinning-wheel, besides keeping well scrubbed and scoured the old floors and simple furniture, which have rendered good service to their mothers and grandmothers before them.

Ask the age of some cottage heirloom—some gaunt old clock or cumbrous chair—and its owner with a smile and a shrug will assure you, vaguely, “It’s ancient, very ancient.”

You do not doubt the assertion; you only wonder how this corner of the restless New World came to have such persistent, all-pervading regard for the past. So many things are “very ancient” in Quebec; yet it is full of its own characteristic life, this once-French city, which has been British for half its three hundred years of history.

THE END