rich in enterprise, modern splendour, and hope; its sister-city, five hundred miles to the eastward, is distinguished for its piety, picturesque antiquity, and history. One city, the Chicago of the East, builds railways and University. halls; the other, the Nuremberg of the West, repairs her mouldering convents and medieval towers. In all things, save their common loyalty to Britain, the two communities are antithetical.

QUEBEC.

Quebec, the Gibraltar of America, occupies a site nearly triangular in form, with the St. Lawrence river on one side, the St. Charles on another, and a line of martello towers on the third, guarding the approaches from the Plains of Abraham. A high rocky promontory advances towards the confluence of the rivers, and supports on its crest the great churches and convents, public buildings and barracks, the fortress-walls and citadel of the Upper Town, perched on the heights like the nest of a sea-bird, proud, heroic, and renowned. On the narrow strands between the waters and the bases of the cliffs are the busy commercial streets of the Lower Town, with their dingy shops and warehouses, their markets and other civic institutions, and the practical activities which go to support the great piece of historic bric-à-brac, the shred of the Middle Ages, on the rocks overhead. The population of the city reaches about 73,000, mainly descendants of the ancient immigrants from the northern provinces of France, with newspapers, shopsigns, and a great body of literature in their own language. The adventurers who came hither were mainly Normans. The peasants of Poitou and Anjou sought the rich farming lands to the eastward; but the descendants of Rollo's sea-kings preferred to make their homes hard by the Great River of Canada, in comparison with which their own Seine was but a summer brook. For this St. Lawrence, over which Quebec stands guard, is one of the noblest rivers in the world. Pilots say that there are no soundings until 150 miles upward from its mouth. It rises in the greatest lake (Superior) in the world; thunders over the most majestic falls (Niagara); and drains a basin of a million square miles, containing half of the fresh water on the earth. Quebec is 180 miles below Montreal, and the average breadth of the stream between the two cities is two miles. Below Quebec it widens rapidly, being 11 miles across at Rivière du Sud, 25 miles at the Paps of Matane, and 96 miles at its mouth. The salt tides ascend for 432 miles. A single one of its tributaries, the Ottawa, contains more water than all the rivers in Great Britain, were they flowing in one.

The chief business at Quebec is connected with timber, vast quantities of which are brought down the river every year, and exported on European vessels. Ship-building is carried on to some extent; and other manufactures exist, but rather feebly. A Government railway connects the city with Montreal; and another line is being constructed towards Lake St. John, near the lonely head-waters of the Saguenay. Across the St. Lawrence is the terminal station of the Grand Trunk Railway, for Upper Canada and the West, and for the Maritime Provinces on the Atlantic, and the ports of New England. But, with all her advantages of position, Quebec may almost be called decadent. Real estate is declining in value, and the boundaries of the town encroach but slowly on the adjacent

country. It would not be in the fitness of things if it were otherwise. There are more than enough bustling, prosperous, and enterprising cities in America; and when the French of Cardinal Richelieu's time reproduced one of their grand old chivalric-monastic communities on this lone rock, high up towards the icy North ("as if," in the words of an English visitor, "an ancient Norman fortress of two centuries ago had been encased in amber, transported by magic to Canada, and placed on the summit of Cape Diamond"), it is well that prosy utilitarianism of the age of steam shall leave it in peace, like an edition of Scott's novels bound in limestone and gun-metal, or a petrifaction of the illuminated pages of the Chronicles of the Cid. Among these rocks and towers, and convent-chimes, America, the child of the new life which is throbbing in the world, can retire to consider the mediæval era, the days of the Grand Monarque, the customs and thoughts of Cluny and Caudebec. Quebec is therefore the show-city of the Western continent-the shrine of countless pilgrimages from remote regions. It bears the same relation to America that Chester does to England, Avignon to France, Nuremberg to Germany, Perugia to Italy. Every summer thousands of Americans journey northward to refresh their spirits, weary of commerce and utilitarianism, with the contemplation of strange forms of alien civilisation, romantic reminiscences of history, architecture which suggests the era of the buccaneers, natural scenery of unsurpassed beauty, and a climate full of tonic and bracing life. The revenues of Quebec are materially increased by these annual influxes of dollars, and the increasing crowds of holiday Americans are welcomed by those considerable classes of the population who are connected with the hotels, shops, and public carriages.

The Citadel of Quebec, the crown of this beautiful antique city, is an immense and powerful fortress, covering forty acres of ground, much higher than the Upper Town, and 345 feet above the St. Lawrence river. It is founded on the dark slaty rocks of Cape Diamond; and the limpid quartz-crystals which give name to the locality may still be picked up in the vicinity. Since the evacuation of Canada by the Imperial troops, the works have been garrisoned by a company of Canadian artillerists, whose main duty it is to conduct wondering tourists about the strong walls, in the hope of receiving republican silver. The Citadel is separated from the Upper Town by a wide sloping glacis, broken by ravelins, and cut through by a winding road from near the Dufferin Gate. Just before this stone-encased road enters the great outer moat, it passes the curious Chain Gate, and then crosses a narrow triangular space under the frowning guns of the Dalhousie Bastion, and approaches the main portal. Within are barracks, magazines, bomb-proof hospitals, armouries, and other grim paraphernalia of a fortress. Standing on the northern bastion, near the great Armstrong gun which commands the river for leagues, one of the most magnificent views in the world is outspread before the visitor, including the broad expanse of the St. Lawrence, the spires and towers of Quebec, the white walls of Beauport, Lorette, and other distant French hamlets, the garden-plains of the Isle of Orleans, the Laurentian Mountains, and the remote blue peaks of Vermont.

In the days of Froissart, it was said that "everie fayre towne hath strong high walls;" but this is the only town of America which possesses such a defence. Tourists from the United States, whose fortresses are hidden away on remote promontories and islands, and whose army is but a nomadic frontier police, ramble along these walls as if they were

slowly turning the pages of an ancient black-letter book, or a chronicle of the Crusades, and dream of the siege of Jerusalem or the Wars of the Roses. As one of their own writers (Thoreau) said:-"In the armoury of the Citadel they showed me a clumsy implement, long since useless, which they called a Lombard gun. I thought that their whole Citadel was such a Lombard gun-fit object for the museums of the curious. Silliman states that the cold is so intense in the winter nights on Cape Diamond, that the sentinels cannot stand it more than one hour. I shall never again wake up on a colder night than usual but I shall think how rapidly the sentinels are relieving one another on the walls of Quebec, their quicksilver being all frozen, as if apprehensive that some hostile Wolfe may even then be scaling the Heights of Abraham, or some persevering Arnold about to emerge from the wilderness: some Malay or Japanese, perchance, coming round by the north-west coast, have chosen that moment to assault the Citadel. Why, I should as soon expect to see the sentinels still relieving one another on the walls of Nineveh, which have so long been buried to the world. What a troublesome thing a wall is! I thought it was to defend me, and not I it. Of course, if they had no walls, they would not need to have any sentinels."

The requirements of modern warfare have rendered the local fortifications of little avail as a means of covering the city from destruction; and the real defences are the three great detached forts on the distant heights of Point Levi, armed with British artillery of heavy calibre. Surveys and plans have been made for another group of forts near Sillery, to protect the western approaches, as the Point Levi works command those on the south. With these lines fairly garrisoned, and a brace of ironclads from the Channel Fleet in the harbour, Quebec would be as impregnable as she was in 1775.

Let us follow the circuit of the ancient ramparts, which still surround the Upper Town (with but few slight breaks), as if they were the rocky girdle of a Western Chester or Berwick-on-Tweed. For a long way from the Citadel they are high and beetling, frowning across their deep moats upon the Plains of Abraham, and with smooth grassy slopes toward the town. Then the very picturesque and many-towered Dufferin Gate appears, over-arching the aristocratic St. Louis Street, and occupying the site of the ancient St. Louis Gate, whose defences were removed in 1871. The clear-cut masonry of this portal attests how recent was the victory of æstheticism over the local Philistines. Beyond Dufferin Gate the wall is high and formidable, and the broad grassy space of the Esplanade, encumbered with old guns, separates it from the town. The curving line of bastions is broken by a street lately cut through, to allow the Frenchmen of the extra-mural Montcalm Ward to comfortably enter towards the Basilica and the Market Place. Here is the new Kent Gate, erected by Queen Victoria, as a memorial of her distinguished father, the Duke of Kent, whose name was so closely connected with that of Quebec. It is a work of considerable architectural beauty, with picturesque Norman turrets and battlements of masonry, and deep-cut arrow-slits. The high embrasured wall may be followed from this point to the massive arches of St. John's Gate, through which the chief business street of the Upper Town passes out upon the plateau beyond towards St. Foy. This gate was built in 1869, on the site of the one before which Montcalm received his death-wound while rallying the defeated regiments of France. When the Americans attacked Quebec, one

of their corps, under Colonel Brown, fruitlessly assaulted the walls in this vicinity. For a considerable distance beyond St. John's Gate, the ramparts are closely bordered by the long buildings of the Artillery barracks, some of which were erected by the French garrison in 1750. They are now silent and deserted, and the rank Canadian grass rustles around cannon that once woke the echoes of the Rhineland, or thundered hotly over the waves at Aboukir. The ragged lawns and dusty dilapidation of the barracks extend to the opening of Palace Gate, through which a steep street descends to the Lower Town. The gate itself

was removed in 1873, to gratify the demon of modern progress. From this point the walls sweep along the edge of the crag on which Quebec is built-neither high nor thick, but as secure as the ramparts of Gibraltar. A street and promenade follow their course, with the Hôtel Dieu and its enclosed gardens on one side, and on the other the loopholes and embrasures of the fortress. Here and there are little bastions, containing one or two long iron guns and sundry benches-favourite resorts of the townsfolk, who from these airy look-outs can survey a fourth part of Lower Canada. This view has been thus characterised by Mr. Howells, the eminent American novelist :-"Over the top of the wall it had such a stretch of landscape as I know not what European street can command: the St. Lawrence, blue and wide; a bit of the white village of Beauport on its bank; then a vast breadth of