pierced with smaller doorways for the foot-passengers.  The gloomy masonry dripped with damp, the doors were thickly studded with heavy iron spikes; old cannon, thrust endwise into the ground at the sides of the gate, protected it against passing wheels.  Why did not some semi-forbidding commissary of police, struggling hard to overcome his native politeness, appear and demand their passports?  The illusion was otherwise perfect, and it needed but this touch.  How often in the adored Old World, which we so love and disapprove, had they driven in through such gates at that morning hour!  On what perverse pretext, then, was it not some ancient town of Normandy?

“Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and they’d soon rattle this old wall down and let in a little fresh air!” said a patriotic voice at Isabel’s elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow irregular streets, the huddling gables, the quaint roofs, through which and under which they drove on to the hotel.

As they dashed into a broad open square, “Here is the French Cathedral; there is the Upper Town Market; yonder are the Jesuit Barracks!” cried Basil; and they had a passing glimpse of gray stone towers at one side of the square, and a low, massive yellow building at the other, and, between the two, long ranks of carts, and fruit and vegetable stands, protected by canvas awnings and broad umbrellas.  Then they dashed round the corner of a street, and drew up before the hotel door.  The low ceilings, the thick walls, the clumsy wood-work, the wandering corridors, gave the hotel all the desired character of age, and its slovenly state bestowed an additional charm.  In another place they might have demanded neatness, but in Quebec they would almost have resented it.  By a chance they had the best room in the house, but they held it only till certain people who had engaged it by telegraph should arrive in the hourly expected steamer from Liverpool; and, moreover, the best room at Hotel Musty was consolingly bad.  The house was very full, and the Ellisons (who had come on with them from Montreal) were bestowed in less state only on like conditions.

The travellers all met at breakfast, which was admirably cooked, and well served, with the attendance of those swarms of flies which infest Quebec. and especially infested the old Musty House, in summer.  It had, of course, the attraction of broiled salmon, upon which the traveller breakfasts every day as long as he remains in Lower Canada; and it represented the abundance of wild berries in the Quebec market; and it was otherwise a breakfast worthy of the appetites that honored it.

There were not many other Americans besides themselves at this hotel, which seemed, indeed, to be kept open to oblige such travellers as had been there before, and could not persuade themselves to try the new Hotel St. Louis, whither the vastly greater number resorted.  Most of the faces our tourists saw were English or English-Canadian, and the young people from Omaha; who had got here by some chance, were scarcely in harmony with the place.  They appeared to be a bridal party, but which of the two sisters, in buff linen ‘clad from head to foot’ was the bride, never became known.  Both were equally free with the husband, and he was impartially fond of both:  it was quite a family affair.