Our Little Quebec Cousin

by Mary S. Saxe

"Alouette, gentille Alouette, Alouette Je te plumerai,
Je te plumerai la tête, Je te plumerai la tête,
O Alouette, gentille Alouette, Alouette Je te plumerai."

A very pleasant surprise was when they reached Montreal, and her father decided to stop at the Place Viger Hotel for a meal before they should take the trolley home. For, to tell the truth, Oisette was very hungry indeed, and so was her father.

Presently they were seated at a little table out on a beautiful stone balcony, with pretty striped awnings, potted plants, where there was an orchestra of young ladies, all dressed in white, who played delightful music. The young lady at the piano kept smiling at Oisette. It was a new experience for our little Quebec cousin to have a full course dinner, served so beautifully, and to have pink ice cream. Do you know that ice cream is almost unknown in a Habitant home? To be sure, French children on the streets of Montreal have recently acquired "the ice cream cone habit"; but vendors of these sweets do not peddle their wares out in the country. Oisette ate her dessert slowly, her dark eyes followed the waiter as he came and went, and now and then she would glance over at the pianist.

When the meal was finished and they were about to depart, to her great surprise, as they passed near the piano, she heard a voice say, "Bon soir, Oisette." Monsieur Tremblent stopped, too, and shook hands with several of the musicians; and Oisette gasped with surprise, for one of them was a cousin of Oisette's mother. This orchestra was composed originally of the members of one family. Five sisters all trained by the nuns at the Sacred Heart convent. In three years' time three of the sisters had married and in each case the gap had been filled by another pupil from this same convent. They were still known as the five sisters, and they still dressed exactly alike. The one who had addressed Oisette was the newest member of the little company. Only the winter previous, at the convent, our little Quebec cousin had played a duet with this Mlle. Archambeau, and had done her part so well that one of the nuns had said to her, "We shall hear of our little Oisette on the concert stage some day."

During the five minutes' rest accorded this hotel orchestra these girls chatted like magpies with the travelers, and sent messages to the other members of the family, and said they hoped to get out to the melon farm some day during the summer, and warned Oisette that she must practice well on the piano, so that she might some day play another duet with her friend. Then the leader tapped his baton and the voices ceased. But the cousin whispered to Monsieur Tremblent: "We are going to play 'The Rosary' now. You'll hear it as you go down in the elevator."

When the-round-the-mountain car stopped at Cote-des-Neiges that night, Monsieur Tremblent and his little daughter alighted in the dusk. They planned to surprise the household. By crossing a meadow they approached the house from the rear, and thought it would be great fun to slip into the kitchen in the darkness and leave their parcels, and then perhaps take off their wraps. Oisette wondered if she might manage to be discovered playing the piano. The French Canadian loves a practical joke.

But it happened that some one in a motor car passed the trolley in which the returned travelers were journeying and the motor stopped at the Tremblent farm about ten minutes before the car was due, and, of course, the visitors said whom they had seen. So Madame Tremblent was ready with every room lighted, and doors open, and Carleau was barking his head off with excitement. The Dudley children were tearing up the road, calling out, "Welcome home!" On the stove was a big pot of pea soup very hot, and on the table a big bunch of field daisies, which the Dudleys had brought early in the day. The big parlor lamp with its red shade was lighted, which meant that it was a very special occasion. Everybody gazed in surprise at Oisette. She certainly had grown a little taller, and she had a nice little manner, which quite unconsciously she had acquired from her grandmother. She forgot her shyness and told them everything; from the time she had left home until to-night when she had dined at the Place Viger. No pea soup to-night, thank you!

When at last she went to bed she gazed about her own room with a new interest. The room seemed smaller than she had thought it before, but her pictures were so pretty. Nowhere had she seen anything she liked as well as her Joan of Arc banner wrought in silk. And there was her own bedspread again, "the music of the spheres," placed there in honor of her return.

"Chime, chime, chime, chime," rang the church bell next morning. This was the bell that had awakened our little Quebec cousin since her birth. It sounded like an old friend, but what a funny, feeble little bell it was after the great tongues of the Quebec bells to which her ears had become attuned.

Presently she heard the popping noise of firecrackers, and Carleau barking madly in the door yard: and she remembered that it was July first, Dominion Day, a legal holiday all over the great country of Canada since 1867. There would be no work done by the English, and the trolley cars would bring numerous picnic parties out to the countryside: and the Dudley family were going to have great doings. They had tried to tell her about it last night, but her mind was still centered on Quebec.