I did not wait for more. My "tact" assured me that even there I was not admissible; so I strolled out again, muttering to myself, "When a man has neither friend nor supper, and the hour is past midnight, the chances are it is 'time to go to bed;'" and with this sage reflection, I wended my way towards a humble lodging-house on the quay, over which, on landing, I read the words, "The Emigrant's Home." CHAPTER XIV. HOW I 'FELL IN' AND 'OUT' WITH THE WIDOW DAVIS For the sake of conciseness in this veracious history, I prefer making the reader acquainted at once with facts and individuals, not by the slow process in which the knowledge of them was acquired by myself, but in all the plenitude which intimate acquaintance now supplies; and although this may not seem to accord with the bit-by-bit and day-by-day narrative of a life, it saves a world of time, some patience, and mayhap some skipping too. Under this plea, I have already introduced Sir Dudley Broughton to the reader; and now, with permission, mean to present Mrs. Davis. Mrs. Davis, relict of Thomas John Davis, was a character so associated with Quebec that to speak of that city without her would be like writing an account of Newfoundland and never alluding to the article "cod-fish." For a great number of years her house had been the rendezvous of everything houseless, from the newly come "married" officer to the flash commercial traveller from the States; from the agent of an unknown land company to the "skipper" of a rank pretentious enough to dine at a boarding-house. The establishment--as she loved to style it--combined all the free-and-easy air of domesticity with the enjoyment of society. It was an "acted newspaper," where paragraphs, military and naval, social, scandalous, and commercial, were fabricated with a speed no "compositor" could have kept up with. Here the newly arrived subaltern heard all the pipeclay gossip, not of the garrison, but of the Province; here the bagman made contracts and took orders; here the "French Deputy" picked up what he called afterwards in the Chamber "l'opinion publique;" and here the men of pine-logs and white deal imbibed what they fervently believed to be the habits and manners of the "English aristocracy." "To invest the establishment with this character," to make it go forth to the world as the mirror of high and fashionable life, had been the passion of Mrs. D.'s existence. Never did monarch labor for the safeguard that might fence and hedge round his dynasty more zealously; never did minister strive for the guarantees that should insure the continuance of his system. It was the moving purpose of her life; in it she had invested all her activity, both of mind and body; and as she looked back to the barbarism from which her generous devotion had rescued hundreds, she might well be pardoned if a ray of self-glorification lighted up her face. "When I think of Quebec when T. J."--her familiar mode of alluding to the defunct Thomas John--"and