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Updated: May 7, 2025
As the natural course of the inlet was necessarily respected, the street had taken a curvature not unlike that of a new moon. The houses were ultra-Dutch, being low, angular, fastidiously neat, and all erected with their gables to the street. Each had its ugly and inconvenient entrance, termed a stoop, its vane or weathercock, its dormer-windows, and its graduated battlement-walls.
It was that of a matron, slim but shapely as an Ionic column. Her face was Grecian, with Corinthian temples; Hellenic eyes that looked from jutting eyebrows, like dormer-windows in an Attic forehead, completed her perfect Athenian outline. She wore a black frock-coat tightly buttoned over her bloomer trousers, and a standing collar. "Your lordship is struck by that face?" said a social parasite.
Even now, after many years, I can remember the delight of the frosty mornings; the joy with which we used to peep through the little panes of the dormer-windows at the white frost over the fields, which promised stronger chances of game being caught; the eagerness with which, oblivious of the cold, we sped through the garden, across the field, along the ditch banks, and up by the woods, making the round of our traps; the expectancy with which we peeped over the whitened weeds and through the bushes, to catch a glimpse of the gums in some "parf" or at some clearly marked "gap"; our disappointment when we found the door standing open and the trigger set just as we had left it the mormng before; our keen delight when the door was down; the dash for the trap; the scuffle to decide which should look in first; the peep at the brown ball screwed up back at the far end; the delicate operation, of getting the hare out of the trap; and the triumphant return home, holding up our spoil to be seen from afar.
The roofs, the gables, the dormer-windows, the porches, the clustered offices in the rear, all seemed to crowd about the great chimney. To this central pillar the paths all converged.
In a grove of primitive oaks, near the main-travelled road, against the misty blue background of the distant mountain-range, stood the stately white residence, with its long veranda supported by dignified Corinthian columns, its steep roof, quaint dormer-windows, and central cupola. "What a joke!" Henley said, with a wry smile, as he started his horse slowly down the incline.
So they went out and took their fill of Quebec with appetites keen through long fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Montreal, and impartially rejoiced in the crooked up-and-down hill streets; the thoroughly French domestic architecture of a place that thus denied having been English for a hundred years; the porte-cocheres beside every house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls; the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the universal dormer-windows; the littleness of the private houses, and the greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents; the breadths of weather-stained city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath; the batteries, with their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of masonry, and the red-coated sergeants flirting with nursery-maids upon the carriages, while the children tumbled about over the pyramids of shot and shell; the sloping market-place before the cathedral, where yet some remnant of the morning's traffic lingered under canvas canopies, and where Isabel bought a bouquet of marigolds and asters of an old woman peasant enough to have sold it in any market-place of Europe; the small, dark shops beyond the quarter invaded by English retail trade; the movement of all the strange figures of cleric and lay and military life; the sound of a foreign speech prevailing over the English; the encounter of other tourists, the passage back and forth through the different city gates; the public wooden stairways, dropping flight after flight from the Upper to the Lower Town; the bustle of the port, with its commerce and shipping and seafaring life huddled close in under the hill; the many desolate streets of the Lower Town, as black and ruinous as the last great fire left them; and the marshy meadows beyond, memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of Cartier and Montcalm.
There one could descry four dormer-windows, guarded with bars; they were the windows of the Fine-Air. A chimney pierced the roof; this was the chimney which traversed the dormitories. The Bel-Air, that top story of the New Building, was a sort of large hall, with a Mansard roof, guarded with triple gratings and double doors of sheet iron, which were studded with enormous bolts.
Informal conventicles of Staff officers, with whom we exchanged greetings, stood about the square in front of the exquisite Hôtel de Ville, with its high-pitched roof pierced with dormer-windows and crowned with many pinnacles.
A section of pie poetically wrapt in a broad leaf of the squash-vine, or pop-corn in its native tissue-paper, and advertising the new Dollar Store in Portland?" They saw the quaintness vanish from the farm-houses; first the dormer-windows, then the curve of the steep roof, then the steep roof itself. By and by they came to a store with a Grecian portico and four square pine pillars.
Behind the long roofs thus visible to Paula over the window-sill, with their tiers of dormer-windows, rose the cathedral spire in airy openwork, forming the highest object in the scene; it suggested something which for a long time she appeared unwilling to utter; but natural instinct had its way.
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