For The Convenience Of Foot-Passengers There Is A Door [116] Near The Gate, With Wooden Stairs, By Ascending Which You Reach The Upper Town.

On the right of the gate is a building which resembles a chapel, [117] and serves for the House of Commons of Canada.

In order to get home we were obliged to go round part of the walls of the town. Even here you have an indescribably beautiful view of the Bay of Quebec and the right bank of the river, which has the appearance of a cape, called Point Levi.

"Shortly after our arrival, I received a visit from Colonel Duchesnay, First Adjutant of the Governor-General, and from [118] Colonel Durnford, Director of Engineers. The first gentleman came to bid me welcome in the name of the Governor, and the latter begged to show me the fortifications. Lord Dalhousie, Governor General of all British possessions in North America, was at that time in England, but was expected daily. During his absence, the Government was under the direction of the Lt.-Governor, Sir Francis Barton, brother of Lord Conyngham. He is a civilian, but is said to fill his high post with credit. The good spirit the inhabitants are in, and the harmony that exists in the colony, are mostly owing to his good management and his humane and friendly deportment towards them. It is said of Lord Dalhousie that he has estranged the hearts of the people from himself and the Government, through his haughty and absolute deportment, and the Opposition party in the Canadian Parliament has thereby been strengthened.

"The upper part of the town is very old and angular, the streets are muddy, and many not paved. Both towns contain about 25,000 inhabitants. The Catholic Cathedral is quite a handsome building, it has three altars, and paintings of but little value. It is near the Seminary, an old French building, with massive walls, having four corners like a bastion. In this Seminary resides the Bishop of Quebec. We had already been introduced to Bishop Plessis, in the house of Sir Francis Burton, and found him a very agreeable and well-informed man. He is the son of a butcher of Montreal, and has elevated himself by his own merit.

"On the second and last day of my sojourn in Quebec I went to the parade, escorted by Colonels Durnford and Duchesnay. I was pleasantly taken by surprise when I found the whole garrison under arms. The commanding officers wished to show me their corps. On the right wing stood two companies of artillery, then a company of sappers and miners, after this, the Sixty-Eighth, and lastly, the Seventy-First Regiment of Infantry. The last is a light regiment, and consists of Scotch Highlanders; it appeared to be in particularly good condition. This regiment is not dressed in the Highland uniform, which was only worn by some of the buglemen. It has a very good band of buglemen, who wear curious caps, made of blue woollen, bordered below with red and white stripes. The troops defiled twice before me.

"On the 6th of September we set out in the steamboat for Montreal. Sir Francis sent us his carriage, which was very useful to the ladies. On the dock stood a company of the Sixty-Fifth Regiment, with their flags displayed as a guard of honour, which I immediately dismissed. The fortifications saluted us with 21 guns; this caused a very fine echo from the mountains. Night soon set in, but we had sufficient light to take leave of the magnificent vicinity of Quebec."

St. Vallier street is sacred to Monseigneur de St. Vallier; his name is identified with the street which he so often perambulated in his visits to the General Hospital, where he terminated his useful career in 1729. His Lordship seems to have entertained a particular attachment for the locality where he had founded this hospital, where he resided, in order to rent his Mountain Hill Palace to Intendant Talon, and thus save the expense of a chaplain. The General Hospital was the third asylum for the infirm which the Bishop had founded. Subsequently, came the Intendant de Meules, who, toward 1684, endowed the eastern portion of the quarter with an edifice (the Intendant's Palace) remarkable for its dimensions, its magnificence and its ornate gardens.

Where Talon (a former Intendant) had left a brewery in a state of ruin and about seventeen acres of land unoccupied, Louis XIV., by the advice of his Intendant de Meules, lavished vast sums of money in the erection of a sumptuous palace, in which French justice was administered, and in which, at a later period, under Bigot, it was purchasable. Our illustrious ancestors, for that matter, were not the kind of men to weep over such trifles, imbued as they were from infancy with the feudal system and all its irksome duties, without forgetting the forced labour (corvees) and those admirable "Royal secret warrants," (lettres de cachet). What did the institutions of a free people, or the text of Magna Charta signify to them?

On this spot stood the notorious warehouse, where Bigot, Cadet and their confederates retailed, at enormous profits, the provisions and supplies which King Louis XV. doled out in 1758 to the starving inhabitants of Quebec. The people christened the house "La Friponne," (The Cheat!!) Near the sight of Talon's old brewery which had been converted into a prison by Frontenac, and which held fast, until his trial in 1674, the Abbe de Fenelon [119] now stands the Anchor Brewery (Boswell's).

We clip the following from an able review in the Toronto Mail, Dec., 1880, of M. Marmette's most dramatic novel, "l'Intendant Bigot":

"In the year 1775 a grievous famine raged, sweeping off large numbers of the poor, while the unscrupulous Bigot and his satellites were revelling in shameless profligacy. It is midnight of Christmas, when an old officer, M. de Rochebrune, pressed with cold and hunger to the last point, resolved to pawn his St. Louis Cross of gold at the Intendant's Palace stores.

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