river, where the whole cramped and crooked city goes for exercise.
It's a formal parade in the evening; but one morning I went there
before breakfast, for a change, and found it the resort of careless
ease; two or three idle boys were sunning themselves on the carriages
of the big guns that stand on the Terrace, a little dog was barking
at the chimneys of the Lower Town, and an old gentleman was walking
up and down in his dressing-gown and slippers, just as if it were
his own front porch. He looked something like Uncle Jack, and I
wished it had been he,--to see the smoke curling softly up from the
Lower Town, the bustle about the market-place, and the shipping in
the river, and the haze hanging over the water a little way off, and
the near hills all silver, and the distant ones blue.

But if we are coming to the grand and the beautiful, why, there is no
direction in which you can look about Quebec without seeing it; and
it is always mixed up with something so familiar and homelike, that
my heart warms to it. The Jesuit Barracks are just across the street
from us in the foreground of the most magnificent landscape; the
building is--think, you Eriecreekers of an hour!--two hundred years
old, and it looks five hundred. The English took it away from the
Jesuits in 1760, and have used it as barracks ever since; but it
isn't in the least changed, so that a Jesuit missionary who visited
it the other day said that it was as if his brother priests had been
driven out of it the week before. Well, you might think so old and so
historical a place would be putting on airs, but it takes as kindly
to domestic life as a new frame-house, and I am never tired of
looking over into the yard at the frowsy soldiers' wives hanging
out clothes, and the unkempt children playing among the burdocks, and
chickens and cats, and the soldiers themselves carrying about the
officers' boots, or sawing wood and picking up chips to boil the