Down the River to the Sea

by Agnes Maule Machar

The three girls were up almost by daylight in the morning, watching the brightening sunshine flush the red rock of Cap Rouge, and then the gradual unfolding of the river panoramas as they passed headland after headland, each opening a fair, new vista beyond. Soon a glittering church steeple gleamed out from the southern shore, rising protectingly over white villages nestling at their feet. Curving recesses of the wooded bank, outlined by one long, picturesque French village street, followed the bend of the shore to the left. “That is Sillery,” said Kate, in reply to May’s eager enquiries.

“Oh,” said May, “that is the place where the old Jesuit residence was,—that Kitty and Mr. Arbuton went to see.”

After the point of Sillery was rounded, there rose, at last, before their delighted eyes, the historic grey rock of Quebec, with its mural-crowned rampart and bastions, and the houses and convents and great churches of the old city climbing up its sides or rambling along the plateau at its foot.

“Oh, that is the citadel!” exclaimed May, breathless with delight.

“And that is Dufferin Terrace, with the straight line of railing and the little pavilions,” explained Kate, while the grim old grey houses above them recalled to Hugh and Flora memories of the old French towns they had seen abroad. As soon as they could disengage themselves from the bustle and confusion of the crowded quay, Kate, who had declared that a calèche was as much “the thing” in Quebec as a gondola in Venice, signalled to two calèche drivers, and the junior members of the party were soon perched on their high seats, while Mrs. Sandford and the luggage went up more comfortably in a commonplace cab. As they rattled over the rough pavements and through the tortuous narrow streets, which—as Kate remarked to Flora—“are just like Europe, I’m sure,” they drove up Mountain Hill, passing the spot where Prescott Gate used to be of old, and catching a glimpse of the Basilica, or cathedral, en route. They clattered rapidly over the hard paved streets of the upper town, and drove, to May’s delight, through a massive old gate with deep, round arches, which the smiling driver announced as “Porte St. Jean.” Just outside it they passed a little French marketplace, and then, after passing one or two crowded streets, they were finally set down in front of a tall, three-story stone house with a red door.

The travelers were, of course, expected, and received with kind courtesy by their hostess, Mrs. Dale, who took them at once up two flights of stairs. “If they are high, they have the better view,” she said, smiling. And so they had. The girls broke out into exclamations of delight, as they gazed from the old-fashioned open windows. In front they looked across streets and houses to the glacis of the Citadel, crowned by its line of ramparts, and could follow, for some distance, the city wall without. The back window commanded a glorious picture. Across a dusky mass of brown, steep-roofed houses, only half lighted up yet by the morning sun, they looked out on a green, undulating champaign country, flecked with patches of deep green woodland, and little white villages clustering here and there round their great church spires; while, for background, rose a grand range of hills, stretching far away in interminable blue vista—all grey and violet in shadow and silvery blue in the sunlight, as the morning mists drifted away, and a wandering sunbeam caught and glorified a tiny white hamlet nestling in the folds of a wooded hill. Just where the sunbeams straggled away into the green country a silver stream wound glittering in the sun, making a bright loop round a point, on which, amid some trees, stood a large stone building.

“That is the St. Charles, you know,” explained Kate, “and there, where you see it twisted like a silver loop, is the place where stood the first mission house of the Recollets, and the Jesuits afterwards.”

“Oh!” said May quickly, “I know! Notre Dame des Anges, was it not? So that was the place where they had their thatched log cabin and where they used to be half frozen in winter, when they were trying to learn the Indian language from their interpreter, while their biggest wood fires could not keep them warm, or their ink from freezing!”

“And, just a little farther down is the place where they suppose Jacques Cartier laid up his ships, when he first came; as you were reading to us the other day, Hugh.”

“Ah, and so that is the place where they went through so much suffering, that terrible winter, when the ships and masts and rigging were all cased in ice, like ghostly ships at the North Pole, and when the cold and the scurvy were killing them off so fast, that it seemed as if none of them would be left to see the spring. How they must have welcomed its coming at last!”