The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top with the names of those who have climbed it, and most of these are Americans, who flock in great numbers to Canada in summer.  They modify its hotel life, and the objects of interest thrive upon their bounty.  Our friends met them at every turn, and knew them at a glance from the native populations, who are also easily distinguishable from each other.  The French Canadians are nearly always of a peasant-like commonness, or where they rise above this have a bourgeois commonness of face and manner, and the English Canadians are to be known from the many English sojourners by the effort to look much more English than the latter.  The social heart of the colony clings fast to the mother-country, that is plain, whatever the political tendency may be; and the public monuments and inscriptions celebrate this affectionate union.

At the English cathedral the effect is deepened by the epitaphs of those whose lives were passed in the joint service of England and her loyal child; and our travellers, whatever their want of sympathy with the sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty in that attitude of proud reverence.  Here, at least, was a people not cut off from its past, but holding, unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist for us only in history.  It gave a glamour of olden time to the new land; it touched the prosaic democratic present with the waning poetic light of the aristocratic and monarchical tradition.  There was here and there a title on the tablets, and there was everywhere the formal language of loyalty and of veneration for things we have tumbled into the dust.  It is a beautiful church, of admirable English Gothic; if you are so happy, you are rather curtly told you may enter by a burly English figure in some kind of sombre ecclesiastical drapery, and within its quiet precincts you may feel yourself in England if you like,—­which, for my part, I do not.  Neither did our friends enjoy it so much as the Church of the Jesuits, with its more than tolerable painting, its coldly frescoed ceiling, its architectural taste of subdued Renaissance, and its black-eyed peasant-girl telling her beads before a side altar, just as in the enviably deplorable countries we all love; nor so much even as the Irish cathedral which they next visited.  That is a very gorgeous cathedral indeed, painted and gilded ‘a merveille’, and everywhere stuck about with big and little saints and crucifixes, and pictures incredibly bad—­but for those in the French cathedral.  There is, of course, a series representing Christ’s progress to Calvary; and there was a very tattered old man,—­an old man whose voice had been long ago drowned in whiskey, and who now spoke in a ghostly whisper,—­who, when he saw Basil’s eye fall upon the series, made him go the round of them, and tediously explained them.

“Why did you let that old wretch bore you, and then pay him for it?” Isabel asked.

“O, it reminded me so sweetly of the swindles of other lands and days, that I couldn’t help it,” he answered; and straightway in the eyes of both that poor, whiskeyfied, Irish tatterdemalion stood transfigured to the glorious likeness of an Italian beggar.