Our Little Quebec CousinSaxe, Mary S. (Mary Sollace)
General
Our Little Quebec Cousin
Saxe, Mary S. (Mary Sollace)
Children -- Québec (Province) -- Juvenile literature
This building of massive gray limestone occupies a whole block and
houses one thousand souls. There are tiny babes whose parents have
deserted them, there are older boys and girls, orphans, there are sick
and aged old men and women, there are one hundred nuns and ninety
novices to do all the work. All these lives are regulated by the sound
of a convent bell.
Exactly on the stroke of twelve noon, the chapel doors open and
visitors are admitted. As soon as they are seated the nuns file in two
by two, and recite the stations of the Cross in a low monotone. Often
some nun with a very beautiful voice sings an anthem. When the service
is over a diminutive sister remains behind as a guide to take visitors
over the building; one who speaks French or English equally well.
It is all very clean, from the great kitchens with vats of pea soup
boiling and the laundries filled with steam in the basement, to the
very top of the building where there are play rooms for the tiny tots.
Here some of the older children line up and sing for the visitors and
are quite ready to receive coins or candies. There is one room where
blind people are taught to read and to do bead work, it is interesting
to watch them select the right shade of bead by simply feeling the end
of the box which holds them.
In another room there are nimble fingers making wax flowers, weaving
lace and doing embroidery.
The drug store was redolent with drugs and a young nun was busy filling
prescriptions; she laughed very hard when Queenie exclaimed: "Why, I
smell Gregory's mixture!" In a tiny room there was a dental chair,
in which was seated a young orphan, and a nun was busy filling this
child's teeth. Nobody was idle, even the very old men and women helped
with the scrubbing of the floors and woodwork.
It was just one o'clock when they came out again at the Guy Street
entrance, and Miss Anstruther said it was high time they had luncheon.
So they went to La Corona Café on that same street, and there, in a
delightful out of door garden, they sat at a small table with the
lovely blue sky above them and flowers all about them, and a very
attentive waiter. It is quite like a Parisian café. During their meal
they chatted together about what they had seen, and asked eagerly about
what was to follow.
"It is a puzzle to decide," said Miss Anstruther, "whether we had best
go up on Mount Royal where from that elevation I could point out to you
many historic spots of interest, including St. Helen's Island named
after Champlain's wife, who was a French Helen somebody--and Victoria
Bridge built when the late King Edward was a boy of eighteen and he
came out here on a tour, and stopped to drive the last rivet in this
bridge, and the location of Dollard's Lane, named from a brave young
Frenchman who fought the Iroquois--or shall we go out to Lachine by
trolley in time to take the boat over the rapids, that will bring us
into the docks by supper time and out home a half hour later.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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