“W’at,” said the eldest of the dark-faced, black haired British blondes of Jewish race,—­“w’at are we going to give at Montrehal?”

“We’re going to give ‘Pygmalion,’ at Montrehal,” answered the British blonde of American birth, good-humoredly burlesquing the erring h of her sister.

“But we cahn’t, you know,” said the lady with the fringed forehead; “Hagnes is gone on to New York, and there’s nobody to do Wenus.”

“Yes, you know,” demanded the, first speaker, “oo’s to do Wenus?

“Bella’s to do Wenus,” said a third.

There was an outcry at this, and “’Ow ever would she get herself up for ’Venus?” and “W’at a guy she’ll look!” and “Nonsense!  Bella’s too ’eavy for Venus!” came from different lively critics; and the debate threatened to become too intimate for the public ear, when one of their gentlemen came in and said, “Charley don’t seem so well this afternoon.”  On this the chorus changed its note, and at the proposal, “Poor Charley, let ’s go and cheer ’im hop a bit,” the whole good-tempered company trooped out of the parlor together.

Our tourists meant to give the rest of the afternoon to that sort of aimless wandering to and fro about the streets which seizes a foreign city unawares, and best develops its charm of strangeness.  So they went out and took their fill of Quebec with appetites keen through long fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Montreal, and impartially rejoiced in the crooked up-and-down hill streets; the thoroughly French domestic architecture of a place that thus denied having been English for a hundred years; the porte-cocheres beside every house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls; the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the universal dormer-windows; the littleness of the private houses, and the greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents; the breadths of weather-stained city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath; the batteries, with their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of masonry, and the red-coated sergeants flirting with nursery-maids upon the carriages, while the children tumbled about over the pyramids of shot and shell; the sloping market-place before the cathedral, where yet some remnant of the morning’s traffic lingered under canvas canopies, and where Isabel bought a bouquet of marigolds and asters of an old woman peasant enough to have sold it in any market-place of Europe; the small, dark shops beyond the quarter invaded by English retail trade; the movement of all the strange figures of cleric and lay and military life; the sound of a foreign speech prevailing over the English; the encounter of other tourists, the passage back and forth through the different city gates; the public wooden stairways, dropping flight after flight from the Upper to the Lower Town; the bustle of the port, with its commerce and shipping and seafaring life huddled close in under the hill; the many desolate streets of the Lower Town, as black and ruinous as the last great fire left them; and the marshy meadows beyond, memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of Cartier and Montcalm.