Picturesque Quebec, By James Macpherson Le Moine










































































































































 -  Since razed), and I doubt if anywhere in Europe there
    is a more mediaeval-looking bit of military architecture. The - Page 145
Picturesque Quebec, By James Macpherson Le Moine - Page 145 of 451 - First - Home

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Since Razed), And I Doubt If Anywhere In Europe There Is A More Mediaeval-Looking Bit Of Military Architecture.

The heavy stone gateway is black with age, and the gate, which has probably never been closed in our century, is of massive frame, set thick with mighty bolts and spikes.

The wall here sweeps along the brow of the crag on which the city is built, and a steep street drops down, by stone-parapeted curves and angles, from the Upper to the Lower Town, when, in 1775, nothing but a narrow lane bordered the St. Lawrence. A considerable breadth of land has since been won from the river, and several streets and many piers now stretch between this alley and the water, but the old Sault-au-Matelot still crouches and creeps along under the shelter of the city wall and the overhanging rock, which is thickly bearded with weeds and grass, and trickles with abundant moisture. It must be an ice pit in winter, and I should think it the last spot on the continent for the summer to find; but when the summer has at last found it, the old Sault-au-Matelot puts on a vagabond air of southern leisure and abandon, not to be matched anywhere out of Italy. Looking from that jutting rock near Hope Gate, behind which the defeated Americans took refuge from the fire of their enemies, the vista is almost unique for a certain scenic squalor and gypsy luxury of colour - sag-roofed barns and stables, and weak-backed, sunken- chested workshops of every sort, lounge along in tumble-down succession, and lean up against the cliff in every imaginable posture of worthlessness and decrepitude, light wooden galleries cross to them from the second stories of the houses which back upon the alley, and over these galleries flutters from a labyrinth of clothes-lines a variety of bright-coloured garments of all ages, sexes and conditions, while the footway underneath abounds in gossiping women, smoking men, idle poultry, cats, children, and large, indolent Newfoundland dogs." - (A Chance Acquaintance, p, 175.)

Adventurous tourists who have risked themselves there in the sultry days of July, have found themselves dazed at the sight of the wonders of the place. Among other indigenous curiosities, they have there noticed what might be taken for any number of aerial tents, improvised no doubt as protection from the scorching rays of a meridian sun. Attached to ropes stretched from one side of the public way to the other, was the family linen, hung out to dry. When shaken by the wind over the heads of the passers-by, these articles of white under-clothing (chemisettes), flanked by sundry masculine nether-garments, presented a tableau, it is said, in the highest degree picturesque. As regards ourselves, desirous from our earliest days to search into the most recondite arcana of the history of our city and to portray them in all their suggestive reality, for the edification of distinguished tourists from England, France and the United States, it has been to us a source of infinite mortification to realize that the only visit which we ever made to Dog Lane was subsequent to the publication of the Album du Touriste; a circumstance which explains the omission of it from that repository of Canadian lore.

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