jangled harshly, and those strange maskers, those quaint black birds
with white breasts and faces, flocked indoors. At the same time a small
dog under her window howled dolorously at the jangling of the bell; and
Kitty, with an impartial joy, turned from the pensive romance of the
convent garden to the mild comedy of the scene to which his woeful note
attracted her. When he had uttered his anguish, he relapsed into the
quietest small French dog that ever was, and lay down near a large,
tranquil cat, whom neither the bell nor he had been able to stir from
her slumbers in the sun; a peasant-like old man kept on sawing wood, and
a little child stood still amidst the larkspurs and marigolds of a tiny
garden, while over the flower-pots on the low window-sill of the
neighboring house to which it belonged, a young, motherly face gazed
peacefully out. The great extent of the convent grounds had left this
poor garden scarce breathing-space for its humble blooms; with the low
paling fence that separated it from the adjoining house-yards it looked
like a toy-garden or the background of a puppet-show, and in its way it
was as quaintly unreal to the young girl as the nunnery itself.

When she saw it first, the city's walls and other warlike ostentations
had taken her imagination with the historic grandeur of Quebec; but the
fascination deepened now that she was admitted, as it were, to the
religious heart and the domestic privacy of the famous old town. She was
romantic, as most good young girls are; and she had the same pleasure in
the strangeness of the things about her as she would have felt in the
keeping of a charming story. To Fanny's "Well, Kitty, I suppose all this
just suits you," when she had returned to the little parlor where the
sufferer lay, she answered with a sigh of irrepressible content, "O yes!
could anything be more beautiful?" and her enraptured eye dwelt upon the
low ceilings, the deep, wide chimneys eloquent of the mighty fires with
which they must roar in winter, the French windows with their curious