Here Are Torn Notices On The Walls Offering
Rewards For The Apprehension Of Thieves And Murderers, Painfully
Suggestive Of Dark Deeds.
A little further are lumber-yards and wharfs,
and mud and sawdust, and dealers in old nails and rags and bones, and
rotten posts and rails, and attempts at grass.
Here are old barrel-hoops,
and patches of old sails, and dead bushes and dead dogs, and old
saucepans, and little plots of ground where cabbages and pumpkins drag on
a pining existence. And then there is the river Charles, no longer clear
and bright, as when trees and hills and flowers were mirrored on its
surface, but foul, turbid, and polluted, with ship-yards and steam-engines
and cranes and windlasses on its margin; and here Quebec ends.
From the rich, the fashionable, and the pleasure-seeking suburb of St.
Louis few venture down into the quarter of St. Roch, save those who, at
the risk of drawing in pestilence with every breath, mindful of their duty
to God and man, enter those hideous dwellings, ministering to minds and
bodies alike diseased. My first visit to St. Roch was on a Sunday
afternoon. I had attended our own simple and beautiful service in the
morning, and had seen the celebration of vespers in the Romish cathedral
in the afternoon. Each church was thronged with well-dressed persons. It
was a glorious day. The fashionable promenades were all crowded; gay
uniforms and brilliant parasols thronged the ramparts; horsemen were
cantering along St. Louis Street; priestly processions passed to and from
the different churches; numbers of calashes containing pleasure-parties
were dashing about; picnic parties were returning from Montmorenci and
Lake Charles; groups of vivacious talkers, speaking in the language of
France, were at every street-corner; Quebec had all the appearance, so
painful to an English or Scottish eye, of a Continental sabbath.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 277 of 478
Words from 75246 to 75559
of 129941
