are hung out upon the door-posts and walls of every house.  Bowers shading curious little shrines meet the eye everywhere.  The white tables of the little shrines are loaded with gilt and tinselled offerings in immense variety.  Curious bosses, like lace-pillows got up for church, swing pendent from the verdant pine-branches.  The vast parish-church, of sombre gray masonry, flashing carnival-fires from the tin-plated pepper-boxes and slopes of its acre of roof, is receiving or disgorging a variegated multitude of good Catholics.  Within, it is a mass of foliage, a wilderness of shrines, a cloud-land of incense.  Long processions of maidens all in white, and others of maidens all in pale watchet-blue, are threading the principal streets.  They are not all very religious maidens, I am afraid; because, as sure as fate, one very young one of those robed in pure white “made eyes” at me as she passed.  Now all this display in Quebec and its suburbs is set forth on a great scale and with bewildering turmoil; but if you want to see it in miniature presentment, you must pass down through St. Roch, and take the road to Lorette.  Arrived among the sauvages,—­for so the Canadian habitant invariably calls his Indian brother, who is often as like him as one pea is like another,—­you will there see the little old Huron church decked out in humble imitation of its younger, but bigger brothers in the city.  The lanes between the log-houses are embowered in a modest way, and the drapery is eked out by many a yellow flannel petticoat and pair of scarlet leggings that dally riotously with each other in the breeze.  The shrines are certainly less magnificent than those fairy bowers of the elf-land St. Roch, but there is a good deal of beaded peltry and bark-work about them, giving them, in a small way, the character of aboriginal bazaars.  The Hurons are bons Catholiques, and everything connected with the fete is conducted with a solemnity becoming the character of the Christian red man.  So decorous, indeed, are the little sauvagesses forming the miniature processions, that I do not remember ever detecting the eyes of any of them wandering and wantoning around, like those of the naughty little processional in white about whose conduct I just now complained.

The instinct of the French-Canadian for Indian trading has led one of that race to establish a general store close by the Huron village, though on the habitant side of the stream.  The gay printed cottons indispensable to the belle sauvagesse are here to be found, as well as the blue blankets and the white, of so much account in the wardrobe of the women as well as of the men.  Here, too, are to be had the assorted beads and silks and worsteds used in the embroidery of moccasons, epaulettes, and such articles; nor is the quality of the Cognac kept on hand by Joe for his customers to be characterized as despicable.  Indeed, it would be hazardous to aver that anything