No More Learning

I was much amused from
first to last with the sounds made by the charette and caleche
drivers. It was that part of their foreign language that you heard the
most of,--the French they talked to their horses,--and which they
talked the loudest. It was a more novel sound to me than the French of
conversation. The streets resounded with the cries, "_Qui donc! _"
"_Marche tot! _" I suspect that many of our horses which came from
Canada would prick up their ears at these sounds. Of the shops, I was
most attracted by those where furs and Indian works were sold, as
containing articles of genuine Canadian manufacture. I have been told
that two townsmen of mine, who were interested in horticulture,
traveling once in Canada, and being in Quebec, thought it would be a
good opportunity to obtain seeds of the real Canada crookneck squash.
So they went into a shop where such things were advertised, and
inquired for the same. The shopkeeper had the very thing they wanted.
"But are you sure," they asked, "that these are the genuine Canada
crookneck? " "Oh, yes, gentlemen," answered he, "they are a lot which I
have received directly from Boston. " I resolved that my Canada
crookneck seeds should be such as had grown in Canada.

Too much has not been said about the scenery of Quebec. The
fortifications of Cape Diamond are omnipresent.
They preside, they
frown over the river and surrounding country. You travel ten, twenty,
thirty miles up or down the river's banks, you ramble fifteen miles
amid the hills on either side, and then, when you have long since
forgotten them, perchance slept on them by the way, at a turn of the
road or of your body, there they are still, with their geometry
against the sky. The child that is born and brought up thirty miles
distant, and has never traveled to the city, reads his country's
history, sees the level lines of the citadel amid the cloud-built
citadels in the western horizon, and is told that that is Quebec. No
wonder if Jacques Cartier's pilot exclaimed in Norman French, "Que
bec! " (What a beak! ) when he saw this cape, as some suppose. Every
modern traveler involuntarily uses a similar expression. Particularly
it is said that its sudden apparition on turning Point Levi makes a
memorable impression on him who arrives by water. The view from Cape
Diamond has been compared by European travelers with the most
remarkable views of a similar kind in Europe, such as from Edinburgh
Castle, Gibraltar, Cintra, and others, and preferred by many. A main
peculiarity in this, compared with other views which I have beheld, is
that it is from the ramparts of a fortified city, and not from a
solitary and majestic river cape alone, that this view is obtained. I
associate the beauty of Quebec with the steel-like and flashing air,
which may be peculiar to that season of the year, in which the blue
flowers of the succory and some late goldenrods and buttercups on the
summit of Cape Diamond were almost my only companions,--the former
bluer than the heavens they faced. Yet even I yielded in some degree
to the influence of historical associations, and found it hard to
attend to the geology of Cape Diamond or the botany of the Plains of
Abraham. I still remember the harbor far beneath me, sparkling like
silver in the sun, the answering highlands of Point Levi on the
southeast, the frowning Cap Tourmente abruptly bounding the seaward
view far in the northeast, the villages of Lorette and Charlesbourg on
the north, and, further west, the distant Val Cartier, sparkling with
white cottages, hardly removed by distance through the clear air,--not
to mention a few blue mountains along the horizon in that direction.
You look out from the ramparts of the citadel beyond the frontiers of
civilization. Yonder small group of hills, according to the
guide-book, forms "the portal of the wilds which are trodden only by
the feet of the Indian hunters as far as Hudson's Bay. " It is but a
few years since Bouchette declared that the country ten leagues north
of the British capital of North America was as little known as the
middle of Africa.