Bildungsromans; Boston (Mass.) -- Fiction; Saint Lawrence River -- Fiction; Upper class -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
Besides helping to compose Fanny's expeditionary corps, and really
exerting himself in the cause of Uncle Jack, as he calls it, Dick is
behaving beautifully. Every morning, after breakfast, he goes over to
the hotel, and looks at the arrivals and reads the newspapers, and
though we never get anything out of him afterwards, we somehow feel
informed of all that is going on. He has taken to smoking a clay pipe
in honor of the Canadian fashion, and he wears a gay, barbaric scarf
of Indian muslin wound round his hat and flying out behind; because
the Quebeckers protect themselves in that way against sunstroke when
the thermometer gets up among the sixties. He has also bought a pair
of snow-shoes to be prepared for the other extreme of weather, in
case anything else should happen to Fanny, and detain us into the
winter. When he has rested from his walk to the hotel, we usually go
out together and explore, as we do also in the afternoon; and in the
evening we walk on Durham Terrace,--a promenade overlooking the
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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