Quebec, August --, 1870.

Dear Girls: Since the letter I wrote you a day or two after we got
here, we have been going on very much as you might have expected. A
whole week has passed, but we still bear our enforced leisure with
fortitude; and, though Boston and New York are both fading into the
improbable (as far as we are concerned), Quebec continues
inexhaustible, and I don't begrudge a moment of the time we are
giving it.

Fanny still keeps her sofa; the first enthusiasm of her affliction
has worn away, and she has nothing to sustain her now but planning
our expeditions about the city. She has got the map and the history
of Quebec by heart, and she holds us to the literal fulfilment of her
instructions. On this account, she often has to send Dick and me out
together when she would like to keep him with her, for she won't
trust either of us alone, and when we come back she examines us
separately to see whether we have skipped anything. This makes us
faithful in the smallest things. She says she is determined that
Uncle Jack shall have a full and circumstantial report from me of all
that he wants to know about the celebrated places here, and I really
think he will, if I go on, or am goaded on, in this way. It's pure
devotion to the cause in Fanny, for you know she doesn't care for
such things herself, and has no pleasure in it but carrying a point.
Her chief consolation under her trial of keeping still is to see how
I look in her different dresses. She sighs over me as I appear in a
new garment, and says, O, if she only had the dressing of me! Then
she gets up and limps and hops across the room to where I stand
before the glass, and puts a pin here and a ribbon there, and gives
my hair (which she has dressed herself) a little dab, to make it lie