Westward with the Prince of Wales

by W. Douglas Newton

The official landing at King's Wharf was full of characteristic colour also. It was in a wide, open space right under the grey rock upon which the Citadel is reared. In this square, tapestried with flags, and in a little canvas pavilion of bright red and white, the Prince met the leading sons of Quebec, the French-Canadian and the English-Canadian; the Bishop of the English cathedral in gaiters and apron, the Bishops of the Catholics in corded hats, scarlet gloves and long cassocks. Sailors and soldiers, women in bright and smart gowns gave the reception a glow and vivacity that had a quality true to Quebec.

From this short ceremony the Prince drove through the quaint streets to the Citadel. In the lower town under the rock his way led through a quarter that might well stage a Stanley Weyman romance. It is a quarter where, between high-shouldered, straight-faced houses, run the narrowest of streets, some of them, like Sous le Cap, so cramped that it is merely practical to use windows as the supports for clothes-lines, and to hang the alleys with banners of drying washing.

In these cramped streets named with the names of saints, are sudden little squares, streets that are mere staircases up to the cliff-top, and others that deserve the name of one of them, The Mountain. In these narrow canyons, through which the single-decked electric trams thunder like mammoths who have lost their way, are most of the commercial houses and nearly all the mud of the city.

At the end of this olden quarter, merging from the very air of antiquity in the streets, Quebec, with a characteristic Canadian gesture, adopts modernity. That is the vivid thing about the city. It is not merely historical: it is up-to-date. It is not merely the past, but it is the future also. At the end of the old, cramped streets stands Quebec's future—its docks.

These great dockyards at the very toe of the cape are the latest things of their kind. They have been built to take the traffic of tomorrow as well as today. Greater ships than those yet built can lie in safe water alongside the huge new concrete quays. Great ships can go into dry dock here, or across the water in the shipyards of Levis. They even build or put together ships of large tonnage, and while we were there, there were ships in half sections; by themselves too big to be floated down from the lakes through the locks, they had come down from the building slips in floatable halves to be riveted together in Quebec.

A web of railways serves these great harbour basins, and the latest mechanical loading gear can whip cargo out of ships or into them at record speed and with infinite ease. Huge elevators—one concrete monster that had been reared in a Canadian hustle of seven days—can stream grain by the million tons into holds, while troops, passengers and the whole mechanics of human transport can be handled with the greatest facility.

The Prince went up the steep cobbled street of The Mountain under the grey, solid old masonry of the Battery that hangs over the town in front of Laval University, that with the Archbishop's palace looks like a piece of old France translated bodily to Canada.

So he came to the big, green Place des Armes, not now a place of arms, and at that particular moment not green, but as thick as a gigantic flower-bed with the pretty dresses of pretty women—and there is all the French charm in the beauty of the women of Quebec—and with the khaki and commonplace of soldiers and civilians. A mighty and enthusiastic crowd that did not allow its French accent to hinder the shout of welcome it had caught up from the throng that lined the slopes of The Mountain.

From this point the route twisted to the right along the Grande Allée, going first between tall and upright houses, jalousied and severe faced, to where a strip of side road swung it left again, and up hill to the Citadel, where His Royal Highness lived during his stay.

From the Place des Armes the profile of the town pushes back along the heights to the peak on which is the Citadel, a squat and massive structure that seems to have grown rather than to have been built from the living rock upon which it is based.