Picturesque Quebec | Page 9

crowned with the guns of old England, the intrepid Dambourg��s, 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 with parental likeness, heir to parental weakness and parental force.
"A few weeks passed, and a pile of wooden buildings rose on the brink of the St. Lawrence, on or near the site of the market-place of the Lower Town of Quebec. The pencil of Champlain, always regardless of proportion and perspective, has preserved its semblance. A strong wooden wall, surmounted by a gallery loop-holed for musketry, enclosed three buildings, containing quarters for himself and his men, together with a court-yard, from one side of which rose a tall dove-cot, like a belfry. A moat surrounded the whole, and two or three small cannon