Gala-Days Part 6

But the storm pa.s.ses on, the clouds sweep magnificently away, and the glowing sky flings up its arch of promise. The lucent waters catch its gleam and spread in their depths a second arch as beautiful and bright.

So, haloed with magnificence, an earth-born bark on fairy waters, completely circled by this glory of the skies and seas, we pa.s.s through our triumphal gateway "deep into the dying day," and are presently doused in the mud at Rouse's Point. Rouse's Point is undoubtedly a very good place, and they were good women there, and took good care of us; but Rouse's Point is a dreadful place to wake up in when you have been in Dream-Land,--especially when a circus is there, singing and shouting under your windows all night long. I wonder when circus-people sleep, or do they not sleep at all, but keep up a perpetual ground and lofty tumbling? From Rouse's Point through Northern New York, through endless woods and leagues of brilliant fire-weed, the spirit of the dead flames that raved through the woods, past corn-fields that looked rather "skimpy," certainly not to be compared to a corn-field I wot of, whose owner has a mono-mania on the subject of corn and potatoes, and fertilizes his fields with his own blood and brain,--a snort, a rush, a shriek, and the hundred miles is accomplished, and we are at Ogdensburg, a smart little town, like all American towns, with handsome residences up, and handsomer ones going up, with haberdashers' shops, and lawyers' offices, and judges' robes, and most hospitable citizens,--one at least,--and all the implements and machinery of government and self-direction, not excepting a huge tent for political speaking and many political speeches, and everybody alert, public-spirited, and keyed up to the highest pitch. All this is interesting, but we have seen it ever since we were born, and we look away with wistful eyes to the north; for this broad, majestic river stretching sky-ward like the ocean, is the Lawrence. Up this river, on the day of St. Lawrence, three hundred years ago, came the mariner of St. Malo,--turning in from the sea till his straining eyes beheld on both sides land, and planted the lilies of France. Now it is the boundary line of empires. Those green banks on the other side are a foreign country, and for the first time I am not monarch of all I survey. That fine little city, with stately trees towering from the midst of its steeples and gray roofs, is Prescott. At the right rise the ramparts of Fort Wellington, whence cannon-b.a.l.l.s came hissing over to Ogdensburg some fifty years ago. We stand within a pretty range, suppose they should try it again! Farther on still is a plain, gray tower, where a handful of "patriots" intrenched and destroyed themselves with perverse martyrophobia in a foolish and fruitless endeavor. The afternoon is before us; suppose we row over; here is a boat, and doubtless a boatman, or the ferry-steamer will be here directly. By no means; a ferry-steamer is thoroughly commonplace; you can ferry-steam anywhere. Row, brothers, row, perhaps you will never have the chance again. Lightly, lightly row through the green waters of the great St. Lawrence, through the sedge and rank gra.s.s that wave still in his middle depths, over the mile and a half of great rus.h.i.+ng billows that rock our little boat somewhat roughly: but I am not afraid,--for I can swim.

"You can, can you?" says the Anakim, incredulously.

"Indeed I can, can't I, Halicarna.s.sus?" appealingly.

"Like a brick!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.es that worthy, pulling away at the oars, and on we shoot, steadily nearing the rustic stone city that looks so attractive, so different from our hasty, brittle, s.h.i.+ngly American half-minute houses,--ma.s.sive, permanent, full of character and solid worth. And now our tiny craft b.u.t.ts against the pier, and we ascend from the Jesuit river and stand on British soil. No stars and stripes here, but Saint George and his dragon fight out their never-ending brawl. No war, no volunteering, no Congress here; but peace and a Parliament and a Queen, G.o.d bless her! and this is her realm, a kingdom. Now if it had been a year ago I do not know that I should not, like Columbus, have knelt to kiss these dingy stones, so much did I love and reverence England, and whatever bore the dear English name.

But we--they, rather--have changed all that. Among the great gains of this memorable year,--among the devotions, the sacrifices, the heroisms,--all the mighty, n.o.ble, and enn.o.bling deeds by which we stand enriched forevermore,--there broods the shadow of one irreparable loss,--the loss of England. Success or failure can make no difference there. English gold, English steel, English pluck, stand today as always; but English integrity, English staunchness, English love, where are they? Just where Prescott is, now that we have come to it; for the substantial stone city a mile and a half away turns out to be a miserable little dirty, b.u.t.ty, s.m.u.tty, stagnant owl-cote when you get into it. What we took for stone is stolidity. It is old, but its age is squalid, not picturesque. We stumble through the alleys that answer for streets, and come to the "Dog and Duck," a dark, dingy ale-room, famous for its fine ale, we are told, or perhaps it was beer: I don't remember. It is not in male nature to go by on the other side of such a thing, and we enter,--they to test the beverage, Grande and I to make observation of the surroundings. We take position in the pa.s.sage between the bar-room and parlor. A yellow-haired Saxon child, with bare legs and fair face, crawls out from some inner hollow to the door, and impends dangerous on the sill, throwing numerous scared backward glances over his shoulder. The parlor is taken bodily out of old English novels, a direct descendant, slightly furbished up and modernized, of the Village inn parlor of Goldsmith,--homely, clean, and comfortless. A cotton tidy over the rocking-chair bewrays, wrought into its crocheted gorgeousness, the name of Uncle Tom. This I cannot stand. Time may bring healing, but now the wound is still fresh. "O, you did Uncle-Tom it famously," I hurl out, doubling my fist at the British lion which glares at me from that cotton tidy. "I remember those days. O yes! you were rampant on Uncle Tom. You are a famous friend of Uncle Tom, with your Exeter Halls, and your Lord Shaftesburys, and your d.u.c.h.ess of Sutherlands! Cry your pretty eyes out over Uncle Tom, dear, tender-hearted British women. Write appealing letters to your sisters over the waters, affectionate, conscientious kindred; canonize your saint, our sin, in tidies, and chair-covers, and Christmas slippers,--we know how to take you now; we have found out what all that is worth we can appraise your tears by the bottle--in pounds, s.h.i.+llings, and pence." But the beer-men curtail my harangue, so I shake my departing fist at the cowering lion, and, leaving this British inst.i.tution, proceed to investigate another British inst.i.tution,--the undaunted English army, in its development in Fort Wellington. A wall shuts the world out from those sacred premises; a stile lets the world in,--over which stile we step and stand on the fort grounds. A party of soldiers are making good cheer in a corner of the pasture,--perhaps I ought to say parade-ground. As no sentinel accosts us, we hunt up one, and inquire if the fort is accessible. He does not know, but inclines to the opinion that it is. We go up the hill, walk round the wall, and mark well her bulwarks, till we come to a great gate, but it refuses to turn. The walls are too high to scale, besides possible pickets on the other side. I have no doubt in the world that we could creep under, for the gate has shrunk since it was made, and needs to have a tuck let down; but what would become of dignity? Grande and the Anakim make a reconnaissance in force, to see if some unwary postern-gate may not permit entrance. Halicarna.s.sus fumbles in his pockets for edge-tools, as if Queen Victoria, who rules the waves, on whose dominions the sun never sets, whose morning drum-beat encircles the world, would leave the main gate of her main fort on one of the frontiers of her empire so insecurely defended that a single American can carry it with his fruit-knife. Such ideas I energetically enforce, till I am cut short by the slow retrogression of the ma.s.sive gate on ponderous hinges turning.

"What about the fruit-knife?" inquires Halicarna.s.sus as I pa.s.s in. The reconnoitering party return to report a bootless search, and are electrified to find the victory already gained.

"See the good of having been through college," exults Halicarna.s.sus.

"How did you do it?" asks Grande, admiringly.

"By genius and a.s.siduity," answers Halicarna.s.sus.

"And lifting the latch," I append, for I have been examining the mechanism of the gate since I came in, and have made a discovery which dislodges my savant from his pinnacle; namely, that the only fastening on the gate is a huge wooden latch, which not one of us had sense enough to lift; but then who thinks of taking a fort by a.s.sault and battery on the latch? Halicarna.s.sus. .h.i.t upon it by mere accident, and I therefore remorselessly expose him. Then we saunter about the place, and, seeing a woman eying us suspiciously from an elevated window, we show the white feather and ask her if we may come in, which, seeing we have been in for some ten minutes, we undoubtedly may; and then we mount the ramparts and peer into Labrador and Hudson's Bay and the North Pole, and, turning to a softer sky, gaze from a "foreign clime"

upon our own dear land, home of freedom, hope of the nations, eye-sore of the Devil, rent by one set of his minions, and ridiculed by another, but coming out of her furnace-fires, if G.o.d please and man will, heartier and holier, because freer and truer, than ever before. O my country, beautiful and beloved, my hope, my desire, my joy, and my crown of rejoicing, immeasurably dearer in the agony of your b.l.o.o.d.y sweat than in the high noon of your proud prosperity! standing for the first time beyond your borders, and looking upon you from afar, now and forevermore out of a full heart I breathe to you benedictions.

PART IV.

Down the St. Lawrence in a steamer, up the St. Lawrence on the maps, we sail through another day full of eager interest. Everything is fresh, new, novel. Is it because we are in high lat.i.tudes that the river and the country look so high? I could fancy that we are on a plateau, overlooking a continent. Now the water expands on all sides like an ocean meeting the sky, and now we are sailing through hay-fields and country orchards, as if the St. Lawrence had taken a turn into our back-yard. We hug the Canada sh.o.r.e, and thick woods come down the banks dipping their summer tresses in the cool Northern river,--broad pasture-lands stretch away, away from river to sky,--brown, dubious villages sail by at long intervals. On the distant southern sh.o.r.e America has stationed her outposts, and unfrequent spires attest a civilized, if remote life. In the sunny day all things are sunny, save when a Claude Lorraine gla.s.s lends a dark, rich mystery to every hill and cloud. The Claude Lorraine gla.s.s is a rara avus, and not only gives new lights to the scenery, but brings out the human nature on board in great force. The Anakim tells us of one man who asked him in a confidential aside, if it was a show, whereat we all laugh. Even I laugh at the man's ignorance,--I, a thief, an a.s.sa.s.sin, a traitor, who six weeks ago had never heard of a Claude Lorraine gla.s.s; but n.o.body can tell who has not tried it how much credit one gets for extensive knowledge, if only he holds his tongue. In all my life I am afraid I shall never learn as much as I have been inferred to know simply because I kept still.

Down the St. Lawrence in an English steamer, where everything is not so much English as John Bull-y. The servants at the table are thoroughly and amusingly yellow-plush,--if that is the word I want, and if it is not that, it is another; for I am quite sure of my idea, though not of the name that belongs to it. The servants are smooth and sleek and intense. They serve as if it was their business, and a weighty business at that, demanding all the energies of a created being.

Accordingly they give their minds to it. The chieftain yonder, in white choker and locks profusely oiled and brushed into a resplendent expanse, bears Atlas on his shoulders. His lips are compressed, his brow contracted, his eyes alert, his whole manner as absorbed as if it were a nation, and not a plum-pudding, that he is engineering through a crisis. Lord Palmerston is nothing to him, I venture to say. I know the only way to accomplish anything is to devote yourself to it; still I cannot conceive how anybody can give himself up so completely to a dinner, even if it is his business and duty. However, I have nothing to complain of in the results, for we are well served, only for a trifle too much obviousness. Order and system are undoubtedly good things, but I don't like to see an ado made about them. Our waiters stand behind, at given stations, with prophetic dishes in uplifted hands, and, at a certain signal from the arch-waiter, down they come like the clash of fate. Now I suppose this is all very well, but for me I never was fond of military life. Under my housekeeping we browse indiscriminately. When we have nothing else to do, we have a meal. If it is nearer noon than morning, we call it dinner. If it is nearer night than noon, we call it supper, unless we have fas.h.i.+onable friends with us, and then we call it dinner, and the other thing lunch; and ten to one it is so scattered about that it has no name at all. At breakfast you will be likely to find me on the door-step with a bowl of bread and milk, while Halicarna.s.sus sits on the bench opposite and brandishes a chicken-bone with the cat mewing furiously for it at his feet. A surrept.i.tious doughnut is sweet and dyspeptic over the morning paper, and gingerbread is always to be had by systematic and intelligent foraging. Consequently this British drill and discipline are thoroughly alarming to me, and I am surprised and grateful to find that we are not individually regulated by a time-table. I expect a drum-beat;--one, incision; two, mastication; three, deglut.i.tion;--but what tyranny does one not expect to find under monarchical inst.i.tutions? Put that into your next volume, intelligent British tourist.

Down the St. Lawrence with millionaires, and artists, and gay young girls, and sallow-faced invalids, and weary clergymen and men of business who do not know what to do with their unwonted leisure and find pleasuring a most unmitigated bore, and mothers with sick children, dear little unnatural pale faces and heavy eyes,--may your angels bring you health, tiny ones!--and, most interesting of all to me, a party of priests and nuns on their travels. They sit near me, and I can see them without turning my head, and hear them without marked listening. The priests are sleekheaded men, and such as sleep o' nights, ruddy, rotund, robust, with black hair and white bands, well-dressed, well-fed, well-to-do, jolly, gentlemanly, clique-y, sensible, shrewd, au fait. The nuns--now I am vexed to look at them.

Are nuns expected to be any more dead to the world than priests? Then I should like to know why they must make such frights of themselves, while priests go about like Christians? Why shall a nun walk black, and gaunt, and lank, with a white towel wrapped around her face, all possible beauty and almost all attractiveness despoiled by her hideously unbecoming dress, while priests wear their hair and their hats and their coats and their collars like any other gentleman? Why are the women to be set up as targets, while the men may pa.s.s unnoticed and unknown? If the woman's head must be shorn and shaven, why not the man's? It is not fair. I can think of no reason, pretext, or excuse, unless it is to be found in the fact that women are more beautiful than men, and need greater disfigurement to make them ugly. That is a fact which I have long suspected, and observations made on this journey confirm my suspicions,--intensify them into certainty. An ugly woman is handsomer than a handsome man,--if you examine them closely. She is finer-grained, more soft, more delicate. Men are animals more than women. I do not now mean the generic sense in which we are all animals, but specifically and superficially. Men look more like horses and cows. See our brave soldiers returning from the wars--Heaven's blessing rest upon them!--grand, but are they not gruff? A woman's face may be browned, roughened, and reddened by exposure, yet her skin is always skin; but often when a man's face has been sheltered from storm and s.h.i.+ne, his skin is hide. His mane is not generally so long and flowing as a horse's, but there it is. Once, in a car, a man in front of me put his arm on the back of his seat and fell asleep.

Presently his hand dropped over, and I looked at it,--a ma.s.s of broad, brawny vitality, great pipes of veins, great crescents of nails, great furrows at the joints, and you might cut a fine sirloin of beef off the ball of the thumb; and this is a hand! _I_ call it an ox. A woman's hand, by hard labor, spreads and cracks, and sprouts bunches at the joints, and becomes tuberous at the ends of the fingers, but you can see that it is a deformity and not nature. It tells a sad story of neglect, of labor, perhaps of heartlessness, cruelty, suffering. But this man's hand was born so. You would not think of pitying him any more than you would pity an elephant for being an elephant instead of an antelope. A woman's hair is silky and soft, and, if not always smooth, susceptible of smoothness. A man's hair is s.h.a.g. If he tries to make it anything else, he does not mend the matter. Ceasing to be s.h.a.g, it does not become beauty, but foppishness, effeminacy, Miss Nancy-ism. A man is a brute by the law of his nature. Let him ape a woman, and he does not cease to be brutal, though he does become ridiculous. The only thing for him to do is to be the best kind of a brute.

In all of which remarks there is nothing derogatory to a man,--nothing at which any one need take offence. I do not say that manhood is not a very excellent kind of creation. Everything is good in its line. I would just as soon have been a beetle as a woman, if I had never been a woman, and did not know what it was. I don't suppose a horse is at all crestfallen because he is a horse. On the contrary, if he is a thorough-bred, blood horse, he is a proud and happy fellow, prancing, spirited, magnificent. So a man may be so magnificently manly that one shall say, Surely this is the monarch of the universe; and hide and s.h.a.g and mane shall be vitalized with a matchless glory. Let a man make himself grand in his own sphere, and not sit down and moan because he is only a connecting link between a horse and a woman.

I suppose Mother Church is fully cognizant of the true state of affairs, and thinks men already sufficiently Satyric, but woman must be ground down as much as possible, or the world will not be fended off.

And ground down they are in body and soul. O Mother Church! as I look upon these nuns, I do not love you. You have done many wise and right deeds. You have been the ark of the testimony, the refuge of the weary, the dispenser of alms, the consoler of the sorrowful, the hope of the dying, the blessing of the dead. You are convenient now, wieldy in an election, effective when a gold ring is missing from the toilette cus.h.i.+on, admirable in your machinery, and astonis.h.i.+ng in your persistency and power. But what have you done with these women? In what secret place, in what dungeon of darkness and despair, in what chains of torpidity and oblivion, have you hidden away their souls?

They are twenty-five and thirty years old, but they are not women. They are nothing in the world but grown-up children. Their expression, their observation, their interests, are infantile. There is no character in their faces. There are marks of pettishness, but not of pa.s.sion. Nothing deep, tender, beneficent, maternal, is there. Time has done his part, but life has left no marks. Their smiles and laughter are the merriment of children, beautiful in children, but painful here. Mother Church, you have dwarfed these women, helplessly, hopelessly. You accomplish results, but you deteriorate humanity.

Down the St. Lawrence, the great, melancholy river, grand only in its grandeur, solitary, unapproachable, cut off from the companions.h.i.+p, the activities, and the interests of life by its rocks and rapids; yet calm and conscious, working its work in silent state.

The rapids are bad for traffic, but charming for travellers; and what is a little revenue more or less, to a sensation? There is not danger enough to awaken terror, but there is enough to require vigilance; just enough to exhilarate, to flush the cheek, to brighten the eye, to quicken the breath; just enough for spice and sauce and salt; just enough for you to play at storm and s.h.i.+pwreck, and heroism in danger.

The rocking and splas.h.i.+ng of the early rapids is mere fun; but when you get on, when the steamer slackens speed, and a skiff puts off from sh.o.r.e, and an Indian pilot comes on board, and mounts to the pilot-house, you begin to feel that matters are getting serious. But the pilot is chatting carelessly with two or three bystanders, so it cannot be much. Ah! this sudden cessation of something! This unnatural quiet. The machinery has stopped. What! the boat is rus.h.i.+ng straight on to the banks. H-w-k! A whole shower of spray is dashed into our faces. Little shrieks and laughter, and a sudden hopping up from stools, and a sudden retreat from the railing to the centre of the deck. Staggering, quivering, aghast, the boat reels and careens.

Seethe and plunge the angry waters, whirling, foaming, furious. Look at the pilot. No chatting now, no bystanders, but fixed eyes and firm lips, every muscle set, every nerve tense. Yes, it is serious.

Serious! close by us, seeming scarcely a yard away, frowns a black rock. The maddened waves dash up its sullen back, the white, pa.s.sionate surf surges into its wrathful jaws. Here, there, before, behind, black rocks and a wild uproar of waters, through all which Providence and our pilot lead us safely into the still deep beyond, and we look into each other's faces and smile.

And now the sunset reddens on the water, reddens on the bending sky and the beautiful clouds, and men begin to come around with cards and converse of the different hotels in the Montreal that is to be; one tells us that the Prince of Wales beamed royal light upon the St.

Lawrence Hall, and we immediately decide to make the balance true by patronizing its rival Donegana, whereupon a man--a mere disinterested spectator of course--informs us in confidence that the Donegana is nothing but ruins; he should not think we would go there; burnt down a few years ago,--a shabby place, kept by a gra.s.s widow; but when was American ever scared off by the sound of a ruin? So Donegana it is, the house with the softly flowing Italian name; and then we pa.s.s under the arch of the famous Victoria Bridge, whose corner-stone, or cap-stone, or whatever it is that bridges have, was laid by the Prince of Wales. (And to this day I do not know how the flag-staff of our boat cleared the arch. It was ten feet above it, I should think, and I looked at it all the time, and yet it shrivelled under in the most laughable yet baffling manner.) In the mild twilight we disembarked, and were quickly omnibused to the relics of Donegana, which turned out to be very well, very well indeed for ruins, with a smart stone front, and I don't know but stone all the way through, with the usual allowance of lace curtains, and carpets, and gilding in the parlors, notwithstanding flames and conjugal desolation; also a hand welcomed us in the gas-lit square adjoining, and we were hospitably entreated and transmitted to the breakfast-table next morning in perfect sight-seeing trim; only the Anakim was cross, and muttered that they had sent him out in the village to sleep among the hens, and there was a cackling and screaming and chopping off of heads all night long. But the breakfast-table a.s.sured us that many a cackle must have been the swan-song of death. Halicarna.s.sus wondered if something might not be invented to consume superfluous noise, as great factories consume their own smoke, but the Anakim said there was no call for any new invention in that line so long as Halicarna.s.sus continued in his present appet.i.te,--with a significant glance at the plump chicken which the latter was vigorously converting into mammalia, and which probably was the very one that disturbed the Anakim's repose. And then we discussed the day's plan of operations. Halicarna.s.sus said he had been diplomatizing for a carriage. The man in the office told him he could have one for five dollars. He thought that was rather high. Man said it was the regular price; couldn't get one for any less in the city.

Halicarna.s.sus went out and saw one standing idle in the market-place.

Asked the price. Three dollars. For how long? Drive you all round the city, Sir; see all the sights. Then he went back and told the man at the office.

"Well," I said, after he had swallowed a wa.s.sail-bowl of coffee, and showed no disposition to go on, "what did you do then?"

"Came in to breakfast."

"Didn't you tell the clerk you would not take his carriage?"

"No."

"Didn't you tell the other man you would take his?"

"No."

"What DID you do?"

"Let it work. Don't be in a hurry. Give a thing time to work."

"And suppose it should work you out of any carriage at all?"

"No danger." And to be sure, when we had finished breakfast, the three-dollar hack was there awaiting our pleasure. Our pleasure was to drive out into the British possessions, first around the mountain, which is quite a mountain for a villa, though nothing to speak of as a mountain, with several handsome residences on its sides, and a good many not so handsome; but the mountain is a pet of Montreal, and, as I said, quite the thing for a c.o.c.kney mountain. Then we went to the French Cathedral, which is, I believe, the great gun of ecclesiastical North America, but it hung fire with me. It was large, but not great.

There was no unity. It was not impressive. It was running over with frippery,--olla podrida cropping out everywhere. It confused you. It distracted you. It wearied you. You sighed for somewhat simple, quiet, restful. The pictures were p.r.o.nounced poor. I don't know whether they were or not. I never can tell a picture as a cook tells her mince-pie meat, by tasting it. One picture is a revealer and one is a daub; but they are alike to me at first glance. For a picture has an individuality all its own. You must woo it with tender ardor, or it will not yield up its heart. The chance look sees only color and contour; but as you gaze the color glows, the contour throbs, the hidden soul heaves the inert canvas with the solemn palpitations of life. Art is dead no longer, but informed with divine vitality. There is no picture but Hope crowned and radiant, or pale and patient Sorrow, or the tender sanct.i.ty of Love. The landscape of the artist is neither painting nor nature, but summer fields and rosy sunsets over-flooded with his own inward light. Only from her Heaven-anointed monarch, man, can Nature receive her knightly accolade. And shall one detect the false or recognize the true by the minute-hand? I suppose so, since some do. But I cannot. People who live among the divinities may know the G.o.ddess, for all her Spartan arms, her naked knee, and knotted robe; but I, earth-born among earth-born, must needs behold the auroral blush, the gliding gait, the flowing vestment, and the divine odor of her purple hair.

In the vestibule of the French Cathedral, I believe it is, you will behold a heart-rending sight in a gla.s.s case, namely, a group of children, babies in long clothes and upwards, in a dreadful state of being devoured by cotton-flannel pigs. Their poor little white frocks are stained with blood, and they are knocked about piteously in various stages of mutilation. A label in front informs you that certain innocents in certain localities are subject to this shocking treatment; and you are earnestly conjured to drop your penny or your pound into the box, to rescue them from a fate so terrible. You must be a cannibal if you can withstand this appeal. Suffering that you only hear of, you can forget, but suffering going on right under your eyes is not so easily disposed of.

Leaving the pigs and papooses, we will go to--which of the nunneries?

The Gray? Yes. But when you come home, everybody will tell you that you ought to have visited the Black Nunnery. The Gray is not to be mentioned in the same year. Do not, however, flatter yourself that in choosing the Black you will be any more enviable; there will not be wanting myriads who will a.s.sure you, that, not having seen the Gray, you might as well have seen nothing at all. To the Gray Nunnery went we, and saw pictures and altars and saints and candlesticks, and little dove-cot floors of galleries jutting out, where a few women crossed, genuflected, and mumbled, and an old woman came out of a door above one of them, and asked the people below not to talk so loud, because they disturbed the wors.h.i.+ppers; but the people kept talking, and presently she came out again, and repeated her request, with a little of the Inquisition in her tones and gestures,--no more than was justifiable under the circ.u.mstances: but she looked straight at me; and O old woman! it was not I that talked, nor my party. We were noiseless as mice. It was that woman over there in a Gothic bonnet, with a bunch of roses under the roof as big as a cabbage. Presently the great doors opened, and a procession of nuns marched in chanting their gibberish.

Of course they wore the disguise of those abominable caps, with gray, uncouth dresses, the skirts taken up in front and pinned behind, after the manner of washerwomen. Yet there were faces among them on which the eye loved to linger,--some not too young for their years, some furtive glances, some demure looks from the yet undeadened youth under those ugly robes,--some faces of struggle and some of victory. O Mother Church, here I do not believe in you! These natures are gnarled, not nurtured. These elaborately reposeful faces are not natural.

These downcast eyes and droning voices are not natural. Not one thing here is natural. Whisk off these clinging gray was.h.i.+ng-gowns, put these girls into crinoline and Gothic bonnets, and the innocent finery that belongs to them, and send them out into the wholesome daylight to talk and laugh and make merry,--the birthright of their young years. A religion that deprives young girls or old girls of this boon is not the religion of Jesus Christ. Don't tell me!

The nuns pa.s.s out, and we wander through the silent yard, cut off by all the gloom of the medieval times from the din, activity, and good cheer of the street beyond, and are conducted into the Old Men's Department. The floors and furniture are faultlessly and fragrantly clean. The kitchen is neat and susceptible of warmth and comfort, even when the sun's short wooing is over. The beds are ranged along the walls plump and nice; yet I hope that, when I am an old man, I shall not have to sleep on blue calico pillow-cases. Here and there, within and without, old men are basking in the rare sweet warmth of summer, and with their canes and their suns.h.i.+ne seem very well bestowed. Now I like you, Mother Church. You do better by your old men than you do by your young women,--simply because you know more about them. How can you, Papa and Messrs. Cardinals, be expected to understand what is good for a girl? If only you would confine yourself to what you do comprehend,--if only you would apply your admirable organizations to legitimate purposes, and not run mad on machinery, you would do angels'

work.

From the old men's quarters we go upstairs where sewing and knitting and all manner of fancy-work, especially in beads, are taught to long and lank little girls by longer and lanker large girls, companioned by a few old women, with commonplace knitting-work. Everything everywhere is thoroughly neat and comfortable; but I have a desperate pang of home-sickness; for if there is one condition of life more intolerable than any other, it is a state of unvarying, hopeless comfort.

From the Gray Nunnery to the English Church, which I like much better than the French Cathedral. There is a general tone of oakiness, solid, substantial, sincere, like the England of tradition,--set off by a brilliant memorial window and a memorial altar, and other memorial things which I have forgotten, but which I make no doubt the people who put them there have not forgotten. Here also we find, as all along in Canada, vestiges of his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. We are shown the Bible which he presented to the Church, and we gaze with becoming reverence upon the august handwriting,--the pew in which he wors.h.i.+pped; and the loyal beadle sees nothing but reverence in our momentary occupation of that consecrated seat. Evidently there is but a very faint line of demarcation in the old man's mind between his heavenly and earthly king; but an old man may have a worse weakness than this,--an unreasoning, blind, faithful fondness and reverence for a blameless prince. G.o.d bless the young man, in that he is the son of his father and mother. G.o.d help him, in that he is to be King of England.

Chancel and window, altar, and arches and aisles and treasures,--is there anything else? Yes, the apple that Eve ate, transfixed to oak,--hard to understood, but seeing is believing. And then past Nelson's monument, somewhat battered, like the hero whom it commemorates; past the Champ de Mars, a fine parade-ground, hard and smooth as a floor; past the barracks and the reservoir, to the new Court-House, ma.s.sive and plain. Then home to dinner and lounging; then travelling-dresses, and the steamer, and a most lovely sunset on the river; and then a night of tranquillity running to fog, and a morning approach to the unique city of North America,--the first and the only walled city _I_ ever saw, or you either, I dare say, if you would only be willing to confess it. The aspect of the city, as one first approaches it, is utterly strange and foreign,--a high promontory jutting into the river, with a shelf of squalid, crowded, tall and shaky, or low and squatty tenements at its base, almost standing on the water and rising behind them, for the back of the shelf, a rough, steep precipice ab.u.t.ted with the solid masonry of wall and citadel. A board fastened somehow about half-way up the rocky cliff, inscribed with the name of Montgomery, marks the spot where a hero, a patriot, a gentleman, met his death. Disembarking, we wind along a stair of a road, up steep ascents, and enter in through the gates into the city,--the walled, upper city,--walls thick, impregnable, gates ponderous, inert, burly. You did well enough in your day, old foes; but with Armstrongs and iron-clads, and Ericsson still living, where would you be?--answer me that. Quaint, odd, alien old city,--a faint phantasmagoria of past conflicts and forgotten plans, a dingy fragment of la belle France, a clinging reminiscence of England, a dim, stone dream of Edinburgh, a little flutter of modern fas.h.i.+on, planted upon a st.u.r.dy rampart of antiquity, a little cobweb of commerce and enterprise, netting over a great deal of church and priest and king with an immovable basis of stolid existence,--that is the Quebec I inferred from the Quebec I saw. Nothing in it was so interesting to me as itself. But pa.s.sing by itself for the nonce, we prudently took advantage of the fine morning, and drove out to the Falls of Montmorency with staring eyes that wanted to take in all views, before, behind, on this side and that, at once; and because we could not, the joints of my neck at least became so dry with incessant action that they almost creaked. Low stone cottages lined the road-sides, with windows that opened like doors, with an inevitable big black stove whenever your eye got far enough in, with a pleasant stoop in front, with women perpetually was.h.i.+ng the floors and the windows, with beautiful and brilliant flowers blooming profusely in every window, and often trailing and climbing about its whole area. Here, I take it, is the home of a real peasantry, a contented cla.s.s, comfortable and looking for no higher lot. These houses seem durable and ultimate. The roofs of both houses and piazzas are broken, projected, picturesque, and often ornamented. They shelter, they protect, they brood, they embrace. There are little trellises and cornices and fanciful adornments. The solid homeliness is fringed with elegance. The people and the houses do not own each other, but they are married. There is love between them, and pride, and a hearty understanding. I can think of a country where you see little brown or red clapboarded houses that are neither solid nor elegant, that are both slight and awkward,--angular and s.h.i.+ngly and dismal. The roofs are intended just to cover the houses, and are scanty at that. The sides are straight, the windows inexorable; and for flowers you have a hollyhock or two, and perhaps an uncomfortably tall sunflower, sovereign for hens. There is no home-look and no home-atmosphere. I love that country better than I like this; but, if you kill me for it, this drive is picturesque. These dumpy little smooth, white, flounced and flowered cottages look like wicker-gates to a happy valley,--born, not built.

The cottages of the country, in my thoughts, yes, and in my heart, are neither born nor built, but "put up,"--just for convenience, just to lodge in while waiting for something better, or till the corn is grown.

Coming man, benefactor of our race, you who shall show us how to be contented without being sluggish,--how to be restful, and yet aspiring,--how to take the goods the G.o.ds provide us, without losing out of manly hearts the sweet sense of providing,--how to plant happy feet firmly on the present, and not miss from eager eyes the inspiriting outlook of the future,--how to make a wife of today, and not a mistress of tomorrow,--come quickly to a world that sorely needs you, and bring a fresh evangel.

The current of our thoughts is broken in upon by a new and peculiar inst.i.tution. Every single child, and every group of children on the road, leaves its play as we pa.s.s by, and all dart upon us on both sides of the carriage, almost under the wheels, almost under the horses'

feet, with out-stretched blackened hands, and intense bright black eyes, running, panting, shouting, "Un sou! un sou! un sou!" I do not think I am quite in love with this as an inst.i.tution, but it is very lively as a spectacle; and the little fleet-footed, long-winded beggars show a touching confidence in human nature. There is no servility in their beggary; and when it is glossed over with a thin mercantile veneering, by the brown little paws holding out to you a gorgeous bouquet of one clover-blossom, two dandelions, and a quartette of sorrel-leaves, why, it ceases to be beggarly, and becomes traffic overlaid with grace, the acanthus capital surmounting the fluted shaft.

We meet also continual dog-carts, something like the nondescript which "blind Carwell" used to drag. Did you never see it? Well, then, like the cart in which the ark went up to Kirjath-jearim. Now you must know.

Stubborn two-wheeled vehicles, with the whole farm loaded into the body, and the whole family on the seat. Here comes one drawn by a cow, not unnatural. Unnatural! It is the key-note of the tune. Everything is cow-y,--slow and sure, firm, but not fast, kindly, sunny, ruminant, heavy, lumbering, basking, content. Calashes also we meet,--a c.u.mbrous, old-fas.h.i.+oned "one-hoss shay," with a yellow body, a suspicion of springlessness, wheels with huge spokes and broad rims, and the driver sitting on the dash-board. Now we are at the Falls of Montmorency. If you would know how they look, go and see them. If you have seen them, you don't need a description; and if you have not seen them, a description would do no good. From the Falls, if you are unsophisticated, you will resume your carriage and return to the city; but if you are au fait, you will cross the high-road, cross the pastures, and wind down a damp, mossy wood-path to the steps of Montmorency,--a natural phenomenon, quite as interesting as, and more remarkable than, the Falls,--especially if you go away without seeing it. Any river can fall when it comes to a dam. In fact, there is nothing for it to do but fall; but it is not every river that can carve out in its rage such wonderful stairways as this,--seething and foaming and roaring and leaping through its narrow and narrowing channel, with all the turbulence of its fiery soul unquelled, though the grasp of Time is on its throat, silent, mighty, irresistible.

Montmorency,--Montmorenci,--sweet and storied name! You, too, have received the awful baptism. Blood has mingled with your sacrifices.

The song of your wild waves has been lost in the louder thunders of artillery, and the breezes sweeping through these green woods have soothed the agonies of dying men. Into one heart this ancient name, heavy with a weight of disaster and fancied disgrace, sank down like lead,--a burden which only death could cast off, only victory destroy; and death came hand in hand with victory.