All the country near Quebec is well supplied now with railroads, and the townsfolk are learning to follow the modern fashion of living in country cottages during the summer months. Quebec merchants leave the city by the evening trains to spend their leisure hours with their families at Charlesbourg, Lorette, Montmorency, or some equally interesting but till lately inaccessible place. Others take the small modern steamboats which ply up and down the shores of the St. Lawrence, or to and from the beautiful Island of Orleans, and which have to make their way carefully past great rafts of lumber, fleet “ocean greyhounds,” or quaint barges of the same pattern as those used by Wolfe in his attack upon Quebec. These newcomers into the country bring new fashions, which in course of time will have their effect upon the habitants; but their influence is as yet scarcely perceptible. [Illustration: Bobbins used in weaving.] Women in broad-brimmed straw hats are still seen in the hay-fields at work beside the men, yet they find time for much labor at loom and spinning-wheel, besides keeping well scrubbed and scoured the old floors and simple furniture, which have rendered good service to their mothers and grandmothers before them. Ask the age of some cottage heirloom—some gaunt old clock or cumbrous chair—and its owner with a smile and a shrug will assure you, vaguely, “It’s ancient, very ancient.” You do not doubt the assertion; you only wonder how this corner of the restless New World came to have such persistent, all-pervading regard for the past. So many things are “very ancient” in Quebec; yet it is full of its own characteristic life, this once-French city, which has been British for half its three hundred years of history. [Illustration: Gate at Laval.--Soldiers’ Monument.--Martello Tower.] TRANSCRIBER NOTES Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Inconsistencies in punctuation have been maintained. Some illustrations moved to facilitate page layout. Footnote added in Foreword to identify referenced photo illustrations. [The end of _Old Quebec, The City of Champlain_, by Emily P. Weaver.] End of Project Gutenberg's Old Quebec, the city of Champlain, by Emily Weaver