ECHOES FROM THE PAST.
Near a modern window in the gallery leans an old spinning-wheel, which was found in the vaults. By its hum in winter twilights, a hundred years ago, soft lullabies were crooned, and fine linen spun for dainty brides, over whose forgotten graves the blossoms of a century of summers have fallen. In hoop and farthingale they tripped over the threshold of the old church of Notre Dame de Bonsecours. They plighted their troth as happily before the altar of the little chapel, as do their descendants in the stately church of Notre Dame, with the grand organ pealing through the dim arches and groined roof.
The old, old wheel is silent, and the fingers that once held distaff and spindle have crumbled into dust, but the noble deeds and glorious names of those days gone by are carven deep in the monument of a grateful country's memory.
Over an archway in the picture gallery is an enormous oil painting, dark with age, of the British Coat of Arms, which, it is whispered, was brought over hurriedly from New York during the American Revolution.
The museum of the Château is daily receiving donations of interesting relics, and has already a fine collection of coins, medals, old swords and historical mementoes—some of the autograph letters of Arnold, Champlain, Roberval, Vaudreuil, Amherst, Carleton, the de Ramezay family and many others, being of great interest.
These early days have passed away forever. The whirr of the spinning-wheel, or shout of the hunter, no longer sound along the banks of the St. Lawrence. No canoe of the painted warrior now glides silently by the shore; for Montreal with its three thousand inhabitants when Vaudreuil beat his retreat, to its present population of 300,000, has thrown its magnificent civilization around these spots hallowed by the footprints of the great men whose feet have walked her ancient streets.
"She has grown in her strength like a Northern queen,
'Neath her crown of light and her robe of snow,
And she stands in her beauty fair between
The Royal Mount and the river below."
The two nationalities live harmoniously side by side in commercial and social life, both retaining their racial and distinctive characteristics. The old chansons of Brittany are still heard from the hay-carts and by the firesides, and up and down the rivers ring out the same songs as when the "fleet of swift canoes came up all vocal with the songs of voyageurs, whose cadence kept time among the dipping paddles."
The Château de Ramezay has suffered many changes and modifications in the various hands through which it has passed since its foundation stones were laid, but the citizens of Montreal, revering its age and associations, are restoring it as much as possible to its original state and appearance; and the thousands who yearly pass through it testify to the romance surrounding the walls of the old Château, Ville Marie's grandest relic of an illustrious past—a past which belongs equally to both French and British subjects, and which has developed a patriotism well expressed in the words of the eloquent churchman, Bruchesi, Archbishop of Montreal, who says: