“O,” cried Isabel, “I’m thankful we’re only to stay one night more, for now we shall be turned out of our nice room by those people who telegraphed for it!”

There is a continuous village along the St. Lawrence from Quebec, almost to Montmorenci; and they met crowds of villagers coming from the church as they passed through Beauport.  But Basil was dismayed at the change that had befallen them.  They had their Sunday’s best on, and the women, instead of wearing the peasant costume in which he had first seen them, were now dressed as if out of “Harper’s Bazar” of the year before.  He anxiously asked the driver if the broad straw hats and the bright sacks and kirtles were no more.  “O, you’d see them on weekdays, sir,” was the answer, “but they’re not so plenty any time as they used to be.”  He opened his store of facts about the habitans, whom he praised for every virtue,—­for thrift, for sobriety, for neatness, for amiability; and his words ought to have had the greater weight, because he was of the Irish race, between which and the Canadians there is no kindness lost.  But the looks of the passers-by corroborated him, and as for the little houses, open-doored beside the way, with the pleasant faces at window and portal, they were miracles of picturesqueness and cleanliness.  From each the owner’s slim domain, narrowing at every successive division among the abundant generations, runs back to hill or river in well-defined lines, and beside the cottage is a garden of pot-herbs, bordered with a flame of bright autumn flowers; somewhere in decent seclusion grunts the fattening pig, which is to enrich all those peas and onions for the winter’s broth; there is a cheerfulness of poultry about the barns; I dare be sworn there is always a small girl driving a flock of decorous ducks down the middle of the street; and of the priest with a book under his arm, passing a way-side shrine, what possible doubt?  The houses, which are of one model, are built by the peasants themselves with the stone which their land yields more abundantly than any other crop, and are furnished with galleries and balconies to catch every ray of the fleeting summer, and perhaps to remember the long-lost ancestral summers of Normandy.  At every moment, in passing through this ideally neat and pretty village, our tourists must think of the lovely poem of which all French Canada seems but a reminiscence and illustration.  It was Grand Pre, not Beauport; and they paid an eager homage to the beautiful genius which has touched those simple village aspects with an undying charm, and which, whatever the land’s political allegiance, is there perpetual Seigneur.

The village, stretching along the broad interval of the St. Lawrence, grows sparser as you draw near the Falls of Montmorenci, and presently you drive past the grove shutting from the road the country-house in which the Duke of Kent spent some merry days of his jovial youth, and come in sight of two lofty towers of stone,—­monuments and witnesses of the tragedy of Montmorenci.