Do I pitch the pipe too low?  We poor honest men are at a sad disadvantage; and now and then I am minded to give a loose to fancy, and attribute something really grand and fine to my people, in order to make them worthier the reader’s respected acquaintance.  But again, I forbid myself in a higher interest; and I am afraid that even if I were less virtuous, I could not exalt their mood upon a battle-field; for of all things of the past a battle is the least conceivable.  I have heard men who fought in many battles say that the recollection was like a dream to them; and what can the merely civilian imagination do on the Plains of Abraham, with the fact that there, more than a century ago, certain thousands of Frenchmen marched out, on a bright September morning, to kill and maim as many Englishmen?  This ground, so green and oft with grass beneath the feet, was it once torn with shot and soaked with the blood of men?  Did they lie here in ranks and heaps, the miserable slain, for whom tender hearts away yonder over the sea were to ache and break?  Did the wretches that fell wounded stretch themselves here, and writhe beneath the feet of friend and foe, or crawl array for shelter into little hollows, and behind gushes and fallen trees!  Did he, whose soul was so full of noble and sublime impulses, die here, shot through like some ravening beast?  The loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din of arms, the cries of victory,—­I vainly strive to conjure up some image of it all now; and God be thanked, horrible spectre! that, fill the world with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still remainest incredible in its moments of sanity and peace.  Least credible art thou on the old battle-fields, where the mother of the race denies thee with breeze and sun and leaf and bird, and every blade of grass!  The red stain in Basil’s thought yielded to the rain sweeping across the pasture-land from which it had long since faded, and the words on the monument, “Here died Wolfe victorious,” did not proclaim his bloody triumph over the French, but his self-conquest, his victory over fear and pain and love of life.  Alas! when shall the poor, blind, stupid world honor those who renounce self in the joy of their kind, equally with those who devote themselves through the anguish and loss of thousands?  So old a world and groping still!

The tourists were better fitted for the next occasion of sentiment, which was at the Hotel Dieu whither they went after returning from the battlefield.  It took all the mal-address of which travellers are masters to secure admittance, and it was not till they had rung various wrong bells, and misunderstood many soft nun-voices speaking French through grated doors, and set divers sympathetic spectators doing ineffectual services, that they at last found the proper entrance, and were answered in English that the porter would ask if they might see the chapel.  They hoped to find there the skull of Brebeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs who perished long ago for