There is much in Montreal that takes me back into the dim mists—the wonderful days when I had lived only three years. It was not here, but farther west—still what is in Canada is Canadian and does not change nor vary. This Canadian land and water and air awakens shadow-things in my memory and visions and voices of the world as it was when I was three.
It is all exceeding fair to look upon about here. The fields are green, not as they are in Massachusetts, but as they might be in the south of France. There is a beautiful, broad, blue river that can be seen from far off, and it sends out a haze and then all is gray French country, and gray French villages. When you come near you see the French peasants working in the fields—old men and maidens, and very old, strange-looking women, all with no English words in their mouths and no English thing in their lives if they can avoid it. They wear brass rings on their hands and in their ears, and the women wear gay-colored fish-wife petticoats, and in all their faces and eyes is that look that comes from working always among vegetables in the sun, the look of a piteous, useless brain.
And there is the strange, long, tree-covered hill that they call Mount Royal. I have in my mind a picture of it in a bygone century, when an adventurous, brave Frenchman and a few Indians of the wild stood high at its summit—he with the French flag unfurled in the wind, and the Indians shading their eyes and looking off and down into the valley. And there was not one sign of human life in the valley, and all was wild growth and tangled underbrush, and death-like silence, except maybe for the far-off sound of flying wild hoofs in the forest. And now this hill is the lodging-place of many things hidden among the trees—convents set about with tall, thick, solid stone walls, and inside the walls are heavy-swathed nuns who have said their farewell to all things without. And there are hospitals founded and endowed in the name of the Virgin, and Jesuit colleges, and the lodges of priests and brotherhoods.
And in the midst of the St. Lawrence valley where the Indians looked down is this old gray-stone city, and in the Place d’Armes square is a fine triumphant statue of Maisonneuve with his French flag.
This gray-stone city is builded thick with gray-stone cathedrals, and some of them are very fine, and some of them are parti-colored as rainbows inside, and all of them are Roman Catholic and French.
The Protestant churches are but churches.
And the Notre Dame cathedral, when the setting sun touches its great, tall, gray, twin towers with red, is even more than French and Roman Catholic. The white-faced women in the nunnery at the side of it must need have a likeness of those eternal towers graven on their narrow devout hearts. Within, the Notre Dame is most gorgeous with brilliant-colored saints and Virgins and a passion of wealth and Romanism.
And is it not wonderful to think that many of these gray-stone buildings and dwellings were here in the sixteen hundreds, and that gray nuns walked in these same green gardens two centuries ago? And the same country was about here, and the same blue water.
And when all is said, the country and the blue water have been here always, and are the most wonderful things of all. If the gray-stone buildings were of yellow gold and of emeralds and brilliants, the green country would be no fairer and no less exquisitely fair, and the blue of the water would go no deeper into the heart and no less deep, and the pale clouds would float high and gently with the same old-time mystery. And the centuries they know are countless.