cargo alongside the booms, sing, fight and dance in the adjacent "shebeens," the year glides on peacefully. On grand, on gala days, in election times, some of the sons of St. Patrick used to perambulate the historical street, flourishing treenails, or _shillaleghs_--in order to _preserve the peace!!!_ of course. To sum up all, Champlain street has an aspect altogether _sui generis_.

A QUEBEC PORTRAIT

(From the ATLANTIC MONTHLY.)

"Physical size and grand proportions are looked upon by the French- Canadians with great respect. In all the cases of popular _émeutes_ that have from time to time broken out in Lower Canada, the fighting leaders of the people were exceptional men, standing head and shoulders over their confiding followers. Where gangs of raftsmen congregate, their 'captains' may be known by superior stature. The doings of their 'big men' are treasured by the French-Canadians in traditionary lore. One famous fellow of this governing class is known by his deeds and words to every lumberer and stevedore and timber- tower about Montreal and Quebec. This man, whose name was Joe Monfaron, was the bully of the Ottawa raftsmen. He was about six feet six inches high, and proportionally broad and deep; and I remember how people would turn round to look after him, as he came pounding along Notre Dame street, in Montreal, in his red shirt and tan-colored _shupac_ boots, all dripping wet, after mooring an acre or two of raft, and now bent for his ashore haunts in the Ste. Marie suburb, to indemnify himself with bacchanalian and other consolations for long- endured hardship. Among other feats of strength attributed to him, I remember the following, which has an old, familiar taste, but was related to me as a fact:

"There was a fighting stevedore or timber-tower, I forget which, at Quebec, who had never seen Joe Monfaron, as the latter seldom came farther down the river than Montreal. This fighting character, however, made a custom of laughing to scorn all the rumors that came down on rafts, every now and then, about terrible chastisements inflicted by Joe upon several hostile persons at once. He, the fighting timber-tower, hadn't found his match yet about the lumber coves at Quebec, and he only wanted to see Joe Monfaron once, when he would settle the question as to the championship of rafts, on sight. One day a giant in a red shirt stood suddenly before him, saying--

"'You're Dick Dempsey, eh?'

"'That's me.' replied the timber-tower, 'and who are you?'

"'Joe Monfaron. I heard you wanted me--here I am,' was the Caesarean answer of the great captain of rafts.

"'Ah! you're Joe Monfaron!" said the bully, a little staggered at the sort of customer he saw before him. 'I said I'd like to see you, for sure, but how am I to know you're the right man?'

"'Shake hands first,' replied Joe, 'and then you will find out, may be.'

"They shook hands--rather warmly, perhaps, for the timber-tower, whose features wore an uncertain expression during the operation, and who at last broke out into a yell of pain, as Joe cast him off with a defiant laugh. Nor did the bully wait for any further explanations, for, whether the man who had just brought the blood spouting out at the tops of his fingers was Joe Monfaron or not, he was clearly an ugly customer, and had better be left alone.

The St. Lawrence, its rafts of timber, raftsmen, _voyageurs_ and their songs, are pleasantly alluded to by a sympathetic French writer of note, X. Marmier, [105] who visited Canada some thirty years ago:

"On the St. Lawrence, traversed by steamboats, by vessels heavily laden, and by light bark canoes, we may see early in the season immense rafts of timber that are brought down from the dense northern forests, hewn where they are felled, drawn to the rivers upon the snow, and made up into rafts. The Canadian crews erect masts and spread their sails, and by the aid of wind and current, and sometimes by rowing, they boldly guide these acres of fir down the rapids to Quebec, while they animate their labours with the melody of their popular songs. A part would intone the Canadian song

"A la Claire Fontaine,"

while the others, repeating the last two lines, would at the same time let drop their oars as those of the former arose.

"There is probably no river on earth that has heard so many vows of love as the St. Lawrence; for there is not a Canadian boatman that has ever passed up or down the river without repeating, as the blade of his oar dropped into the stream, and as it arose, the national refrain.

"Il y a longtemps que je t'aime, Jamais je ne t'oublierai!"

"Long time have I loved thee, Never will I forget thee!"

"And I will here say that there is a harmonious sweetness in these simple words, that well accords with the simple yet imposing character of the scenery of this charming region.

"Upon our coquettish rivers in Europe they may whisper of loves along their flowery banks and under the vine-clad terraces that overhang them, like the curtains of a saloon; but here, in this grand severity of nature, upon these immense, half desert plains, in the silence of these gloomy forests, on the banks of this majestic river that is ever speeding onward to the eternal ocean, we may feel emotions that are truly sublime. If, in this quiet solitude, should we open the soul to a dream of love, it takes the serious tone; it needs must be a pure being that dares to breathe to the heavens and to the waves these sacred words, 'I love thee,' and that can add the promise and the pledge of the Canadian song:

"Jamais je ne t'oublierai." "Ne'er will I forget thee!" [106]

Among the streets of Quebec, most celebrated in our annals by reason of the incidents which attach thereto, one may name the frowsy and tortuous highway which circulates from the foot of Mountain Hill, running for a distance of two hundred feet below the Cape, up to the still narrower pathway which commences west of St. James street and leads to the foot of the hill "_de la canoterie_;" [107] all will understand we mean the leading commercial thoroughfare of olden time, [108] Sault-au-Matelot street. Is it because a sailor, no doubt only partially relieved from the horrors of sobriety, there made a wild leap? or are we to attribute the name to the circumstance of a dog named "Matelot" ("Sailor") there taking a leap? [109] Consult _Du Creux_. Our friend, Joseph Marmette, appropriated it for the reception of his hero, "Dent de Loup," who escaped without broken bones after his leap. [110]

The western portion of the still narrower pathway of which we have just spoken, rejoices in the name of "Ruelle des Chiens," (Dog Lane); [111] the directories name it Sous-le-Cap street. It is so narrow that, at certain angles, two carts passing in opposite directions, would be blocked. Just picture to yourself that up to the period of 1816, our worthy ancestors had no other outlet in this direction at high water to reach St. Roch, (for St. Paul street was constructed subsequently to 1816, as M. de Gaspé has informed us.) Is it not incredible? As, in certain passes of the Alps, a watchman no doubt stood at either extremity of this lane, provided with a speaking trumpet to give notice of any obstruction and thus prevent collisions. This odoriferous locality, especially during the dog-days, is rather densely populated. The babes of Green Erin, with a sprinkling of young Jean Baptistes, here flourish like rabbits in a warren. Miss Kitty Ellison and her friend. Mr. Arbuton, in their romantic wanderings, were struck with the _mise en scène_ of Dog Lane:--

"Now that Prescott Gate, by which so many thousands of Americans have entered Quebec since Arnold's excursionists failed to do so, is demolished, there is nothing left so picturesque and characteristic as Hope Gate (alas! 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. Our most illustrious tourists, [112] the eldest son of the Queen, the Prince of Wales, his brothers, the Princes Alfred and Arthur, the Dukes of Newcastle, of Athol, of Manchester, of Beaufort, of Argyle, of Sutherland, Generals Grant and Sherman, and Prince Napoleon Bonaparte,