Next summer they would come again, yes; but, ah me’ every one knows what next summer is!

Part of the burlesque troupe rode down in the omnibus to the Grand Trunk

Ferry with them, and were good-natured to the last, having shaken hands all round with the waiters, chambermaids, and porters of the hotel.  The young fellow with the bad amiable face came in a calash, and refused to overpay the driver with a gay decision that made him Basil’s envy till he saw his tribulation in getting the troupe’s luggage checked.  There were forty pieces, and it always remained a mystery, considering the small amount of clothing necessary to those people on the stage, what could have filled their trunks.  The young man and the two English blondes of American birth found places in the same car with our tourists, and enlivened the journey with their frolics.  When the young man pretended to fall asleep, they wrapped his golden curly head in a shawl, and vexed him with many thumps and thrusts, till he bought a brief truce with a handful of almonds; and the ladies having no other way to eat them, one of them saucily snatched off her shoe, and cracked them hammerwise with the heel.  It was all so pleasant that it ought to have been all right; and in their merry world of outlawry perhaps things are not so bad as we like to think them.

The country into which the train plunges as soon as Quebec is out of sight is very stupidly savage, and our friends had little else to do but to watch the gambols of the players, till they came to the river St. Francis, whose wandering loveliness the road follows through an infinite series of soft and beautiful landscapes, and finds everywhere glassing in its smooth current the elms and willows of its gentle shores.  At one place, where its calm broke into foamy rapids, there was a huge saw mill, covering the stream with logs and refuse, and the banks with whole cities of lumber; which also they accepted as no mean elements of the picturesque.  They clung the most tenderly to traces of the peasant life they were leaving.  When some French boys came aboard with wild raspberries to sell in little birch-bark canoes, they thrilled with pleasure, and bought them, but sighed then, and said, “What thing characteristic of the local life will they sell us in Maine when we get there?  A section of pie poetically wrapt in a broad leaf of the squash-vine, or pop-corn in its native tissue-paper, and advertising the new Dollar Store in Portland?” They saw the quaintness vanish from the farm-houses; first the dormer-windows, then the curve of the steep roof, then the steep roof itself.  By and by they came to a store with a Grecian portico and four square pine pillars.  They shuddered and looked no more.