The largest public square in the city is the Champ de Mars, formerly a parade-ground, adjoining which are two noble public buildings, the handsome Court-house, three hundred feet long, and the adjacent Hotel de Ville, nearly five hundred feet long. The Victoria Skating Rink, the largest in the world, is the most noted amusement structure. The city is noted for athletic sports, and toboggan slides abound, some of enormous length, down the mountain slopes. The Montreal Bonsecours Market is famed everywhere, and presents an imposing Doric front nearly five hundred feet long upon the river bank, surmounted by a domed tower. Here gather in force the French Canadian peasantry, known as the _habitans_, to sell their produce and wares, and it gives a quaint exhibition of old-time French customs. The ancient Church of Notre Dame de Bonsecours is alongside, originally founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys in 1673 for the reception of a miraculous statue of the Virgin, entrusted to her by one of the associates of the Society founding Montreal, Baron de Faucamp. The church was burnt and then rebuilt in 1771, and is a quaint structure of a style rarely seen outside of Normandy, having shops built up against it after the fashion common in old European towns. Thus does this famous city combine the methods and styles of the Middle Ages with the manners and enterprises of to-day. It is an impressive fact that notwithstanding the prodigious religious development, all the denominations get on without friction. There is an underlying spirit of toleration, and it is recorded that after the British conquest of Canada the Protestants who came into Montreal occupied one of the Catholic churches for worship, assembling after the Catholic morning mass; and that for twenty years after 1766 the Church of England people occupied the Catholic church of the Recollets every Sunday afternoon. The Presbyterians are said to have also used the same church prior to 1792, and then having removed into a church of their own, they presented the priests of the Recollet church a gift of candles for the high altar and of wine for the mass as a token of good will and their thanks for the gratuitous use of the church. Then the churches were few, but now all denominations have their own, and numerously. MONTREAL SURROUNDINGS.