Quebec is quaint, ancient and picturesque, presenting strange contrasts. A fortress and commercial mart have been built together on the summit of a rock, like an eagle's nest. It is a French city in America, ruled by the English, and was held mainly by Scotch and Irish troops; a town with the institutions of the middle ages under modern constitutional government, having torrid summers and polar winters, and a range of the thermometer from thirty degrees below zero to one hundred degrees above. When Charles Dilke came here he thought he was back in the European Middle Ages. He found "gates and posterns, cranky steps that lead up to lofty gabled houses with steep French roofs of burnished tin like those of Liége; processions of the Host; altars decked with flowers; statues of the Virgin; sabots and blouses; and the scarlet of the British linesmen. All these are seen in narrow streets and markets that are graced with many a Cotentin lace cap, and all within forty miles of the Down East Yankee State of Maine. It is not far from New England to Old France. There has been no dying out of the race among the French Canadians. The American soil has left their physical type, religion, language and laws absolutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling villages; dance to the fiddle after mass on Sundays as gaily as once did their Norman sires; and keep up the _fleur de lys_ and the memory of Montcalm. More French than the French are the Lower Canada _habitans_. The pulse-beat of the Continent finds no echo here." Henry Ward Beecher thought Quebec the most curious city he had ever seen, saying, "It is a peak thickly populated, a gigantic rock, escarped, echeloned, and at the same time smoothed off to hold firmly on its summit the houses and castles, although, according to the ordinary laws of nature, they ought to fall off, like a burden placed on a camel's back without a fastening. Yet the houses and castles hold there as if they were nailed down. At the foot of the rock some feet of land have been reclaimed from the river, and that is for the streets of the Lower Town. Quebec is a dried shred of the Middle Ages hung high up near the North Pole, far from the beaten paths of the European tourists--a curiosity without parallel on this side of the ocean. The locality ought to be scrupulously preserved antique. Let modern progress be carried elsewhere. When Quebec has taken the pains to go and perch herself away up near Hudson's Bay, it would be cruel and unfitting to dare to harass her with new ideas, and to speak of doing away with the narrow and tortuous streets that charm all travellers in order to seek conformity with the fantastic ideas of comfort in vogue in the nineteenth century." THE FORTRESS OF QUEBEC.