The travellers found no words adequate to express the delight awakened by the glorious picture, and gazed on in silence, while light mists floated away from the summits of the hills, and sudden glints of sunshine gave them an added touch of glorious beauty.
But they could not stay there all day, and all too soon they turned away from the beautiful picture, which they would often hereafter see before the inner eye; and returned along the walls, past little piles of cannon balls and gun-mounted embrasures, till they came down again into the court-yard and the wide, green ditch, on the slope of which sleek cows were peacefully grazing, close to the now harmless guns.
Whither should they go next? They would just have time, Kate said, to take in the Basilica and the Ursuline convent before luncheon. Thither, accordingly, they went, meeting long-robed ecclesiastics and bright-eyed academy boys in their trim gray uniforms;--pretty French nurse-maids and British orderlies, hurrying along laden with packages of official papers, all just as it had been described in "A Chance Acquaintance." The Basilica, or great French Cathedral, they found rather disappointing within, for the impression of massiveness made by the exterior seemed incongruous with the gaudy white and gold of the interior decorations.
"It seems rather out of keeping," said Hugh, a little discontentedly, "with what one reads of its history, in those stormy old times, when the French colonists used to come here to pray for deliverance from Iroquois raids, or to offer up thanksgiving for some timely succor."
"But you know, it has been rebuilt more than once since those old times," said Kate; and May tried to recall in imagination the great bare-raftered building of those old days, and found much satisfaction in the high porcelain stoves at the entrance, which gave a "foreign look" to the building at once.
To the Ursuline chapel they went next, and, after application made at a grated window of the convent, a tranquil-faced nun opened the great door, and they passed into the quiet little chapel, so dainty in all its arrangements, and looked at the great picture, by Champlain, of Christ at the house of Simon, the Pharisee,--at the tablet to the memory of Montcalm, whose skull is still preserved there;--and then, with still more interest at the tiny jet of flame in the glass chandelier, kept alight, for a hundred and fifty years, in memory of a young French girl who took the veil all those years ago, and whose brothers made provision to preserve in perpetuity this touching tribute to her memory. But the rosy-faced, contented looking s[oe]ur, who acted as guide, would by no means let them pass out without special attention to the elaborate flower painting on velvet which adorned the altar, and testified at least to the skill and industry of the present nuns.