They went to the chapel of the Seminary at Laval University, and admired the Le Brun, and the other paintings of less merit, but equal interest through their suggestion of a whole dim religious world of paintings; and then they spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so much in looking at the Crucifixion by Vandyck which is there, as in reveling amid the familiar rococo splendors of the temple.  Every swaggering statue of a saint, every rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those that on the carven and gilded clouds above the high altar float—­

     “Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,”—­

was precious to them; the sacristan dusting the sacred properties with a feather brush, and giving each shrine a business-like nod as he passed, was as a long-lost brother; they had hearts of aggressive tenderness for the young girls and old women who stepped in for a half-hour’s devotion, and for the men with bourgeois or peasant faces, who stole a moment from affairs and crops, and gave it to the saints.  There was nothing in the place that need remind them of America, and its taste was exactly that of a thousand other churches of the eighteenth century.  They could easily have believed themselves in the farthest Catholic South, but for the two great porcelain stoves that stood on either side of the nave near the entrance, and that too vividly reminded them of the possibility of cold.

In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and other confusions of the South and North, and one never quite reconciles himself to them.  The Frenchmen, who expected to find there the climate of their native land, and ripen her wines in as kindly a sun, have perpetuated the image of home in so many things, that it goes to the heart with a painful emotion to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon them.  As you ponder some characteristic aspect of Quebec,—­a bit of street with heavy stone houses opening upon a stretch of the city wall, with a Lombardy poplar rising slim against it,—­you say, to your satisfied soul, “Yes, it is the real thing!” and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a mere picture.  The sky is blue, the sun is often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that the pathetic radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness that summer is but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit at the first dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before the snow.  But somehow, from without or from within, that light of the North is there.

It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the little circular garden near Durham Terrace, where every brightness of fall flowers abounded,—­marigold, coxcomb, snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and sunflower.  It was a substantial and hardy efflorescence, and they fancied that fainter-hearted plants would have pined away in that garden, where the little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light, fell back again with a