The Young Girls,
Walking In Pairs, Or With Their Lovers, Had The True Touch Of Provincial
Unstylishness, The Young Men
Had the ineffectual excess of the second-rate
Latin dandy, the elder the rude inelegance of a bourgeoisie in them;
But
a few better-figured avocats or notaires (their profession was as
unmistakable as if they carried their well-polished door-plates upon their
breasts), walked and gravely talked with each other. The non-American
character of the scene was not less vividly marked in the fact, that each
person dressed according to his own taste, and frankly indulged private
shapes and colours. One of the promenaders was in white, even to his
canvas shoes; another, with yet bolder individuality, appeared in perfect
purple. It had a strange, almost portentous effect when these two
startling figures met as friends and joined with each other in the
promenade with united arms; but the evening was beginning to darken round
them, and presently the purple comrade was merely a sombre shadow beside
the glimmering white.
The valleys and the heights now vanished; but the river defined itself by
the varicolored light of the ships and steamers that lay, dark, motionless
hulks upon its broad breast; the lights of Point Levis swarmed upon the
other shore; the Lower Town, two hundred feet below them, stretched an
alluring mystery of clustering roofs and lamp-lit windows, and dark and
shining streets around the mighty rock, mural-crowned. Suddenly a
spectacle peculiarly Northern and characteristic of Quebec revealed
itself; a long arch brightened over the northern horizon; the tremulous
flames of the aurora, pallid violet or faintly tinged with crimson, shot
upward from it, and played with a vivid apparition and evanescence to the
zenith. While the stranger looked, a gun boomed from the Citadel, and the
wild, sweet notes of the bugle sprang out upon the silence."
THE LOWER TOWN.
On bidding adieu to the lofty plateau which constitutes the Upper Town, on
our way to an antiquarian ramble in the narrow, dusty, or muddy
thoroughfares of the Lower (as it was formerly styled) the Low Town, we
shall cast a glance, a glance only, at the facade of the City Post Office,
on the site of which, until razed in 1871, stood that legendary, haunted
old house, "LE CHIEN D'OR." Having fully described it elsewhere, [81] let
us hurry on, merely looking up as we pass, to the gilt tablet and
inscription and its golden dog, gnawing his bone, pretty much as he
appeared one hundred and twenty-two years ago, to Capt. John Knox, of the
43rd Regt., on his entering Quebec, after its capitulation on the 18th
September, 1759. History has indeed shed very little light on the Golden
Dog and its inscription since that date, but romance has seized hold of
him, and Kirby, Marmette, Soulard and others have enshrined both with the
halo of their imagination. In 1871 the corner stone of the "Chien d'Or"
was unearthed; a leaden plate disclosed the following inscription:
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