The Personality of American CitiesHungerford, Edward
History
The Personality of American Cities
Hungerford, Edward
Cities and towns -- United States; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
Sometimes our friend of old Quebec led us to the churches of the
town--many of them capped with roosters upon their steeples, instead of
the Roman cross which we had believed inevitable with the Catholic
church. Since then we have been informed that many of the Swiss churches
of the same faith have that high-perched cock upon the steeple-tops. We
paused once at a new church on the rim of the town, where the very old
habit of having a nun in constant adoration of the Host is perpetuated,
paused again at the ever fascinating Notre Dame des Victoiries in Lower
Town, with its battlemented altar and its patriotic legends in French,
which a British government has been indulgent enough to overlook, stood
again and again at the wonderful Van Dyke which hangs in the clear,
cool, white and gold Basilica. From the churches, we sometimes went to
the chapels; the modern structure of the Seminary, or the fascinating
holy places of the Ursulines, where the kind-hearted Mother Superior
turned our attention from the imprisoned nuns chanting their prayers
behind an altar screen, like the decorous and constant hum of
honey-bees, to the skull of Montcalm. Then we must see his burial place
in the very spot in the chapel wall cleft open by a rampant British
shell sent to harass his army.
"Montcalm," said our gentleman of the old Quebec. "He was, sir, the
bravest soldier and the finest that France ever sent overseas."
And we could only remember that other fine monument of Quebec, out on
the Grande Allee toward the point where Abraham Martius's cows, chewing
their cuds on an open plain, awoke one day to find one of the world's
great battles being fought--almost over their very heads. In that
creation of marble and of bronze, the great figure of Fame is perched
aloft, reaching down to place her laurel branch upon a real French
gentleman--Montcalm--at the very hour of his death. That memorial is
something more. In a fashion somewhat unusual to monuments, it fairly
vitalizes reality.
* * * * *
There must be a real reason why Quebec is such a Mecca for honeymoon
journeys. You can see the grooms and the brides out on the Terrace,
summernight after summernight. Romance hovers over that high-hung place.
It sometimes saunters there of a sunshiny morning--a couple here, or a
couple there in seemingly loving irresponsibility as to the fact that
ours is a workaday world, after all. It lingers at the afternoon tea,
along the Terrace promenade. It comes into its own, night after night,
when the boys and girls of the town promenade back and forth to the
rhythmical crash of a military band, or in the intervals stand at the
rail looking down at the rough pattern of street-lights in Lower Town,
the glistening string of electrics at Levis, or listening to the rattle
of ship's winches which give a hint that, after all, there is a world
beyond Quebec.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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