The Place d'Armes, down in the old part of the city, where is the original Seminary of St. Sulpice, is surrounded by famous structures. Here are the chief banks and insurance buildings and the head office of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The most noted of them is the Grecian-fronted Bank of Montreal, the largest financial institution in Canada, and believed, with the Canadian Pacific management, who are closely connected, to be the most potential force in the Dominion. Adjoining the old Seminary, and facing the square, is Montreal's most famous church--Notre Dame--its lofty front rising into the twin spires that overlook all the country round. Its pews seat ten thousand, and when crowded it accommodates fifteen thousand people. In one of the towers hangs "Le Gros Bourdon," the largest bell in America, called Jean Baptiste, and weighing nearly fifteen tons. The church is mediæval Gothic, built of cut limestone, the spires rising two hundred and twenty-seven feet, and containing ten bells, making a chime upon which, on great occasions, tunes are played. The interior, like all the French Catholic churches, is brilliantly decorated, for the religious development is the same as that of France in the seventeenth century, everything contributing to the intensity of the devotion and the elaborateness of decoration and paraphernalia of the service. At High Mass, when crowded by worshippers, the choir filled with robed ecclesiastics officiating in the stately ceremonial, the effect is imposing. The original church of Notre Dame was built in 1671, a long, low structure with a high pitched roof. It was pulled down in 1824 and replaced by the present church, which was five years building, and is one of the largest churches in America, two hundred and fifty-five feet long. We are told that the architect, James O'Donnell, who is buried in the crypt, was a Protestant, but during the work became so impressed by his religious surroundings that he was converted to a Roman Catholic. The church is never closed, and at any time one can enter, and with the silent worshippers kneel at the shrine in a solemn stillness, in sharp contrast with the activity of the business quarter without. This remarkable contrast deeply impressed the ascetic Thoreau, whose boast was that he never attended church. "I soon found my way to the Church of Notre Dame," he writes. "I saw that it was of great size and signified something. Coming from the hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages, we pushed back the listed door of this church and found ourselves instantly in an atmosphere which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one had any. It was a great cave in the midst of a city, and what were the altars and the tinsel but the sparkling stalactites into which you entered in a moment, and where the still atmosphere and the sombre light disposed to serious and profitable thought? Such a cave at hand, which you can enter any day,