CHAPTER I.

THE MANOIR OF DORMILLIÈRE.


In the year One Thousand Eight Hundred and Seventy odd, about six years
after the confederation of the Provinces into the Dominion of Canada, an
Ontarian went down into Quebec,--an event then almost as rare as a
Quebecker entering Ontario.

"It's a queer old Province, and romantic to me," said the Montrealer
with whom old Mr. Chrysler (the Ontarian) fell in on the steamer
descending to Sorel, and who had been giving him the names of the
villages they passed in the broad and verdant panorama of the shores of
the St. Lawrence.

In truth, it _is_ a queer, romantic Province, that ancient Province of
Quebec,--ancient in store of heroic and picturesque memories, though the
three centuries of its history would look foreshortened to people of
Europe, and Canada herself is not yet alive to the far-reaching import
of each deed and journey of the chevaliers of its early days.

Here, a hundred and thirty years after the Conquest, a million and a
half of Normans and Bretons, speaking the language of France and
preserving her institutions, still people the shores of the River and
the Gulf. Their white cottages dot the banks like an endless string of
pearls, their willows shade the hamlets and lean over the courses of
brooks, their tapering parish spires nestle in the landscape of their
new-world _patrie_.