So she has given herself to the development of transcontinental railroad projects. When one Canadian railroad decided to use her as the summer terminal of its largest trans-Atlantic liners without sending those great vessels further up to Montreal, Quebec saw quickly what that meant to her in prestige and importance. When the railroads told her, as politely as they might, that they could not develop her as a mighty traffic center because of the broad arm of the St. Lawrence which blocked rail access from the South, she put her wits together and set out to bridge that arm with the greatest cantilever in the world. The fall of the Quebec bridge five years ago with its toll of eighty lives, was a great blow to the commercial hopes of the town. But they have begun to arise once more. The wreckage of that tragedy is already out of the way and the workmen are trying again, placing fresh foundations for the slender, far-reaching span that is going to mean so very much to the portal city of Canada. * * * * * But progress has not robbed Quebec of her charm. It seems quite unlikely that such a brutal tragedy shall ever come. They may come as they did a year or two ago and tear down the impressive Champlain market--one of the very great lions of the Lower Town--but they do not understand the _habitans_ from those back country villages around Quebec. Progress does not come to those obscure communities--no, not even slowly. The women still gather together at some mountain stream on wash-days and cleanse their laundry by placing it over flat rocks by the waterside and pounding it with wooden paddles, there are more barns roofed with thatch than with shingles, to say nothing of farms where a horse is an unknown luxury and men till the soil much as the soil was tilled in the days of Christ. From those places came the _habitans_ to Champlain market--within my memory some of them in two-wheeled carts drawn by great Newfoundland dogs--and it was a gay place on at least two mornings of the week. One might buy if one pleased--bartering is a fine art to the French-Canadian and one dear to his soul--or one might pass to the next stall. But one could never pass very many stalls, with their bright offerings of food-stuffs or simple wearing apparels alike set in garniture of the brilliant flowers of this land of the short warm summer.