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The American Jew and I took a caleche, a little two-wheeled local carriage, driven by a lively Frenchman with a factitious passion for death-spots and churches. A small black and white spaniel followed the caleche, yapping. The American’s face shone with interest. “That dawg’s Michael,” he said, “the hotel dawg. He’s a queer little dawg. I kicked his face; and he tried to bite me. Hup, Michael!” And he laughed hoarsely. “Non!” said the driver suddenly, “it is not the ‘otel dog.” The American did not lose interest. “These little dawgs are all alike,” he said. “Dare say if you kicked that dawg in the face, he’d bite you. Hup, Michael!” With that he fell into deep thought.

We rattled up and down the steep streets, out among tidy fields, and back into the noisily sedate city again. We saw where Wolfe fell, where Montcalm fell, where Montgomery fell. Children played where the tides of war had ebbed and flowed. Mr Norman Angell and his friends tell us that trade is superseding war; and pacifists declare that for the future countries will win their pride or shame from commercial treaties and tariffs and bounties, and no more from battles and sieges. And there is a part of Canadian patriotism that has progressed this way. But I wonder if the hearts of that remarkable race, posterity, will ever beat the harder when they are told, “Here Mr Borden stood when he decided to double the duty on agricultural implements,” or even “In this room Mr Ritchie conceived the plan of removing the shilling on wheat.” When that happens, Quebec will be a forgotten ruin…. The reverie was broken by my friend struggling to his feet and standing, unsteady and bareheaded, in the swaying carriage. In that position he burst hoarsely into a song that I recognised as ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ We were passing the American Consulate. His song over, he settled down and fell into a deep sleep, and the caleche jolted down even narrower streets, curiously paved with planks, and ways that led through and under the ancient, tottering wooden houses.

But Quebec is too real a city to be ‘seen’ in such a manner. And a better way of spending a few days, or years, is to sit on Dufferin Terrace, with the old Lower Town sheer beneath you, and the river beyond it, and the citadel to the right, a little above, and the Isle of Orleans and the French villages away down-stream to your left. Hour by hour the colours change, and sunlight follows shadow, and mist rises, and smoke drifts across. And through the veil of the shifting of lights and hues there remains visible the majesty of the most glorious river in the world.

From this contemplation, and from musing on men’s agreement to mark by this one great sign of the Taking of the Heights of Quebec, the turning of one of the greatest currents in our history, I was torn by a journey I had been advised to make. The boat goes some hundred and thirty miles down the St Lawrence, turns up a northern tributary, the Saguenay, goes as far as Chicoutimi, ninety miles up, and returns to Quebec. Both on this trip, and between Quebec and Montreal, we touched at many little French villages, by day and by night. Their habitants, the French-Canadian peasants, are a jolly sight. They are like children in their noisy content. They are poor and happy, Roman Catholics; they laugh a great deal; and they continually sing. They do not progress at all. As a counter to these admirable people we had on our boat a great many priests. They diffused an atmosphere of black, of unpleasant melancholy. Their faces had that curiously unwashed look, and were for the most part of a mean and very untrustworthy expression. Their eyes were small, shifty, and cruel, and would not meet the gaze…. The choice between our own age and mediaeval times is a very hard one.