Picturesque Quebec | Page 9

the Chevalier de Lévis and General
Murray fought that other battle, in memory of which the citizens of
Quebec are erecting (in 1854) a monument. Before us, on the heights of
Beauport, the souvenir of battles not less heroic, recall to our
remembrance the names of Longueuil, St. Hélène, and Juchereau
Duchesnay. Below us, at the foot of that tower on which floats the
British flag, Montgomery and his soldiers all fell, swept by the
grape-shot of a single gun pointed by a Canadian artilleryman.
"On the other hand, under that projecting rock, now crowned with the
guns of old England, the intrepid Dambourgès, sword in hand, drove
Arnold and his men from the houses in which they had established
themselves. History is then everywhere around us. She rises as well
from these ramparts, replete with daring deeds, as from those illustrious
plains equally celebrated for feats of arms, and she again exclaims:
'Here I am!'"
CHAPTER II.
_QUEBEC FOUNDED, JULY 3,_ 1608.
Fancy borne on the outspread wings of memory occasionally loves to

soar o'er the dull, prosaic present, far away into the haunted,
dream-land of a hazy but hopeful past.
Let us recall one year, in the revolving cycle of time--one day above all
days--for dwellers in Champlain's eyry keep pre-eminently sacred that
auspicious 3rd of July, 1608, when his trusty little band, in all twenty-
eight, founded the city destined soon to be the great Louis's proud
forta- lice,--the Queen city of the French western world.
On that memorable July day, would you, kind reader, like to ascend the
lofty slope of Cape Diamond, at the hour when the orb of light is
shedding his fierce, meridian rays on the verdant shores and glancing
waters below, and watch with bated breath the gradually increasing gap
in the primeval forest, which busy French axes are cleaving in order to
locate the residence--"L'ABITATION"--of a loved commander, Samuel
de Champlain?
Or else would you, in your partiality for the cool of the evening, prefer
from the dizzy summit, where now stands our citadel, to gaze--which
would be more romantic--over the silent strand at your feet, pregnant
with a mighty future, at the mystic hour of eve, when the pale beams of
Diana will lend incomparable witchery to this novel scene. Few indeed
the objects denoting the unwelcome arrival of Europeans in this forest
home of the red man: the prise de possession by the grasping outer
barbarian-- for such Champlain must have appeared to the descendants
of king Donnacona. In the stream, the ripple of the majestic St.
Lawrence caresses the dark, indistinct hull of an armed bark: in Indian
parlance, a "big canoe [6] with wings"; on an adjoining height waves
languidly with the last breath of the breeze the lily standard of old
France; on the shore, a cross recently raised: emblems for us of the past
and of the present: State and Church linked together.
Such the objects decernible amid the hoary oaks, nodding pines, and
green hemlocks, below Cape Diamond, on that eventful 3rd of July,
1608.
THE DWELLING OF CHAMPLAIN.

"Above the point of the Island of Orleans," says Parkman, "a
constriction of the vast channel narrows it to a mile; on one hand, the
green heights of Point Levi; on the other, the cliffs of Quebec. Here, a
small stream, the St. Charles, enters the St. Lawrence, and in the angle
betwixt them rises the promontory, on two sides a natural fortress.
Land among the walnut-trees that formed a belt between the cliffs and
the St. Lawrence. Climb the steep height, now bearing aloft its
ponderous load of churches, convents, dwellings, ramparts, and
batteries,--there was an accessible point, a rough passage, gullied
downward where Prescott Gate (in 1871) opened on the Lower Town.
Mount to the highest summit, Cape Diamond, [7] now zig-zagged with
warlike masonry. Then the fierce sun fell on the bald, baking rocks,
with its crisped mosses and parched lichens. Two centuries and-a-half
have quickened the solitude with swarming life, covered the deep
bosom of the river with barge and steamer and gliding sail, and reared
cities and villages on the site of forests; but nothing can destroy the
surpassing grandeur of the scene.
"Grasp the savin anchored in the fissure, lean over the brink of the
precipice, and look downward, a little to the left, on the belt of woods
which covers the strand between the water and the base of the cliffs.
Here a gang of axe-men are at work, and Point Levi and Orleans echo
the crash of falling trees.
"These axe-men were pioneers of an advancing host,--advancing, it is
true, with feeble and uncertain progress: priests, soldiers, peasants,
feudal scutcheons, royal insignia. Not the Middle Age, but engendered
of it by the stronger life of modern centralization; sharply stamped