I hurried up my letters yesterday, so as to bring my journal down to the day I was writing on, fearing lest otherwise I should never catch the thread again. I doubt whether I told you anything about this very fine city, in the suburbs of which we are stopping, and which we leave to-day. Well, I scarcely know how to begin to give you an idea of it. It isn’t the least like an English or indeed any European town, the reason being, I take it, that it has been built with the necessity of meeting extremes of heat and cold, which we never get. Except in the heart of the city, where the great business streets are, there are trees along the sides of all the thoroughfares—maples, which give real shade, and are in many places indeed too thick, and too near the houses for comfort I should say—as near as the plane-tree was to our drawing-room window at 33. This arrangement makes walking about very pleasant to me, even when the thermometer stands at 90° in the shade as it did yesterday. Then instead of a stone foot-pavement you have almost everywhere boards, timber being the most plentiful production of the country. Walking along the boards in the morning you see at every door a great lump of ice, twenty pounds weight or so, lying there for the maid to take in when she comes out to clean. This is supplied by the ice merchants for a few shillings a year. The houses are square, built generally of a fine limestone found all over the island (Montreal is an island thirty-six miles long by nine wide), and have all green open shutter-blinds, which they keep constantly shut all day, as in Greece, to keep out the heat, and double windows to keep out the cold. The roofs are generally covered with tin instead of tiles or slates, and all the church steeples, of which there are a very large number, are tinned, as you remember we saw them in parts of Austria and Hungary. There are magnificent stores of dry goods, groceries, etc., but scarcely any shops in our sense. No butcher, milkman, greengrocer, etc., calls at the door, and the ladies have all to go down to the market or send there. Nothing can be better than the living, but Mrs. S——— complains that it is very hard work for hausfraus, and I have heard Lady K——— say the same thing. This house is in one of the shaded avenues on the slopes of the mountain, two miles I should say from the market. Mrs. S———- drives down every marketday and buys provisions, market-days being twice a week, but the stalls are open on other days also, so that if a flood of company comes in on the intermediate days, the anxious housewife need not be absolutely done for. The living is as good as can be, not aspiring to first-rate French cookery, but equal to anything you find in good English houses. Prices are very reasonable except for fancy articles of clothing, etc. Furs, which you would expect to find cheap, are at least as high as in London, and R———made an investment in gloves for which he paid six shillings a pair. The city is the quietest and best-behaved I ever was in. We dined at the mess of the 60th Rifles last night, and walked home through the heart of the city at 10.30. Every one had gone to bed, apparently, for there wasn’t a light in fifty houses and we literally met no one—not half a dozen people certainly in the whole distance. Altogether I am very much impressed with the healthiness of the life, morally and physically, and can scarcely imagine any country I would sooner start in were I beginning life again.