Our best path leads west again from the Place d'Armes, past the newly reconstructed General Post Office, more stately banks here concentrating the wealth of the strong, new Canada; smart British-looking shops and restaurants. In these last you may drink fine ales, munch at rare cheeses, of which Montreal is _connoisseur_, and eat rare roast beef done to a turn, with Yorkshire pudding, six days in a week. But you will look in vain for real French restaurants with their delectable _cuisines_. We have looked in vain in our almost innumerable trips to the city under the mountain. We have enlisted our friend Paul, who avers that he knows Montreal as he knows the fingers on his hand. Paul is a reporter on a French paper. He works not more than fourteen consecutive hours on dull days, at a princely salary of nine dollars a week, and the rest of the time he is our entertainment committee--and an immense success at that. Paul has taught us a smattering of Montreal French, and he has shown us many curious places about the old city, but he has never found us a French restaurant that could even compare with some we know in the vicinity of West Twenty-seventh street in the city of New York. Sometimes he has come to us with mysterious hints of final success and we have girded our loins quickly to go with him. But when we have arrived it has been a place white-fronted like the dairy lunches off from Broadway, and we have never seen one of them without the listing of breakfast foods from Battle Creek, Michigan, mince-pie or other typical dishes from the States. And at Paul's rarest find we interviewed _Monsieur le proprietaire_, only to have the dashing news that he had once served as second _chef_ in the old Burnet House, in Cincinnati. There is, after all, a closer bond between two neighboring nations than either Ottawa or London is willing to admit and even Paul, loyal to his language and to his traditions, admits that. "Some day--some day," he dreams to us between cigarettes, "I am going down to see the Easter parade on Fifth avenue. Last year twelve thousand went from Montreal"--he chuckles--"and folks from Bordeaux ward looked at the swells from Westmount and thought they were real New Yorkers." And a little while later, between another change of cigarettes, he adds: "And I may not come back on my ticket. I understand--that reporters get fifteen or twenty dollars a week on the New York city papers." Paul's collar is impossible and his appetite for cigarettes fiendish, but he has ambitions. Perhaps he shares the ambitions of the city which, old in heart and traditions, is new in enterprise and hope, and looks forward to being the mighty gateway of the greatest of all English great possessions--a city filled with more than a million folk. * * * * *