"
"Yes, you know," demanded the first speaker, "oo's to do Wenus?
"Bella's to do Wenus," said a third.
There was an outcry at this, and "'Ow ever would she get herself up for
'Venus?" and "W'at a guy she'll look!" and "Nonsense! Bella's too 'eavy
for Venus!" came from different lively critics; and the debate threatened
to become too intimate for the public ear, when one of their gentlemen
came in and said, "Charley don't seem so well this afternoon." On this
the chorus changed its note, and at the proposal, "Poor Charley, let 's
go and cheer 'im hop a bit," the whole good-tempered company trooped out
of the parlor together.
Our tourists meant to give the rest of the afternoon to that sort of
aimless wandering to and fro about the streets which seizes a foreign
city unawares, and best develops its charm of strangeness. So they went
out and took their fill of Quebec with appetites keen through long
fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Montreal, and
impartially rejoiced in the crooked up-and-down hill streets; the
thoroughly French domestic architecture of a place that thus denied
having been English for a hundred years; the porte-cocheres beside every
house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls;
the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the
universal dormer-windows; the littleness of the private houses, and the
greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents; the breadths of
weather-stained city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath; the batteries,
with their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of masonry, and the
red-coated sergeants flirting with nursery-maids upon the carriages,
while the children tumbled about over the pyramids of shot and shell; the
sloping market-place before the cathedral, where yet some remnant of the
morning's traffic lingered under canvas canopies, and where Isabel bought
a bouquet of marigolds and asters of an old woman peasant enough to have
sold it in any market-place of Europe; the small, dark shops beyond the
quarter invaded by English retail trade; the movement of all the strange
figures of cleric and lay and military life; the sound of a foreign
speech prevailing over the English; the encounter of other tourists, the
passage back and forth through the different city gates; the public
wooden stairways, dropping flight after flight from the Upper to the
Lower Town; the bustle of the port, with its commerce and shipping and
seafaring life huddled close in under the hill; the many desolate streets
of the Lower Town, as black and ruinous as the last great fire left them;
and the marshy meadows beyond, memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of
Cartier and Montcalm.
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