Later, one of them appeared to Isabel in the person of the pale, slender young ecclesiastic who had shown her and Basil the pictures in the country church.  She was confessing to the priest, and she was not at all surprised to find that he was Basil in a suit of medieval armor.  He had an immense cross on his shoulder.

“To get this cross to the top of the mountain,” thought Isabel, “we must have two horses.  Basil,” she added, aloud, “we must have two horses!”

“Ten, if you like, my dear,” answered his voice, cheerfully, “though I think we’d better ride up in the omnibus.”

She opened her eyes, and saw him smiling.

“We’re in sight of Quebec,” he said.  “Come out as soon as you can,—­come out into the seventeenth century.”

IX.  QUEBEC.

Isabel hurried out upon the forward promenade, where all the other passengers seemed to be assembled, and beheld a vast bulk of gray and purple rock, swelling two hundred feet up from the mists of the river, and taking the early morning light warm upon its face and crown.  Black-hulked, red-illumined Liverpool steamers, gay river-craft and ships of every sail and flag, filled the stream athwart which the ferries sped their swift traffic-laden shuttles; a lower town hung to the foot of the rock, and crept, populous and picturesque, up its sides; from the massive citadel on its crest flew the red banner of Saint George, and along its brow swept the gray wall of the famous, heroic, beautiful city, overtopped by many a gleaming spire and antique roof.

Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, modern world the vessel steamed up to this city of an olden time and another ideal,—­to her who was a lady from the first, devout and proud and strong, and who still, after two hundred and fifty years, keeps perfect the image and memory of the feudal past from which she sprung.  Upon her height she sits unique; and when you say Quebec, having once beheld her, you invoke a sense of medieval strangeness and of beauty which the name of no other city could intensify.

As they drew near the steamboat wharf they saw, swarming over a broad square, a market beside which the Bonsecours Market would have shown as common as the Quincy, and up the odd wooden-sidewalked street stretched an aisle of carriages and those high swung calashes, which are to Quebec what the gondolas are to Venice.  But the hand of destiny was upon our tourists, and they rode up town in an omnibus.  They were going to the dear old Hotel Musty in Street, wanting which Quebec is not to be thought of without a pang.  It is now closed, and Prescott Gate, through which they drove into the Upper Town, has been demolished since the summer of last year.  Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road, by those Quebec horses which expect to gallop up hill whatever they do going down, they turned a corner of the towering weed-grown rock, and shot in under the low arch of the gate,