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Del Williams Media
One Night's Mystery
One Night's Mystery
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In the summer. But the summer, brief and sweet as a pleasant dream, is at an end; the ides of October are here. Shrill October winds whistle down the wide empty streets; drifts of scarlet maple and orange hemlock leaves swirl in your face; a black frost holds the earth iron bound; your footsteps ring like steel over the unpaved sidewalks; the keen breath of coming winter sets your blood leaping, your eyes sparkling, and lights in dusk Canadian cheeks a hue rosier than all the rouge végétal on earth can give.
"And the last of October will be Halloween! This is the twenty-ninth—only two days more. Girls, do stop whooping like a tribe of Mic-macs gone mad, and list, oh! list to me. Friday next is Halloween."
But the speaker's voice was lost in the shrieking uproar of five-and-thirty school-girls "on the war-path." Afternoon school was over, the day scholars gone home, and the boarders, out in the playground for the last half-hour's recess before evening study, were rending the heavens with the deafening, distracting din that five-and-thirty of those rose-cheeked, gold-haired, corseted angels alone know how to raise.
If there was one thing besides its churches for which Petit St. Jacques was famous, it was the establishment of the Demoiselles Chateauroy for young ladies. It stood in the centre of the Rue St. Dominique; and if there was anything to choose in the matter of dulness and respectability among all the dull and respectable streets of the little town, the Rue St. Dominique should be awarded the palm. There were no shops, there were no people; the houses looked at you as you passed with a sad, settled, melancholy mildew upon them; the doors rarely opened, the blinds and curtains were never drawn; prim little gardens, with prim little gravel-paths, shut in these sad little houses from the street; now and then a pale, pensive face might gleam at you from some upper window, spectre-like, and vanish. The wheels of a passing wagon echo and re-echo down its long silence; the very dogs who sneak out to waggle their tails in the front grass-plot have a forlorn and secret-sorrow sort of air. Take it for all in all, you might travel from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande and not find another so absolutely low-spirited and drearily respectable a street as the Rue St. Dominique. Indeed, as Miss Sydney Owenson often and justly remarked, it was a very poor compliment to St. Dominique to christen it after him at all. Miss Sydney Owenson was one of the Demoiselles Chateauroy's five-and thirty boarders; and it may as well be stated here as elsewhere, had made the Demoiselles Chateauroy more trouble, broken more laws, been condemned to solitary confinement oftener, been the head and front of more frolicsome offendings, and, withal, been better loved by both pupils and teachers during the past three years than the other four-and-thirty put together.
"And the last of October will be Halloween! This is the twenty-ninth—only two days more. Girls, do stop whooping like a tribe of Mic-macs gone mad, and list, oh! list to me. Friday next is Halloween."
But the speaker's voice was lost in the shrieking uproar of five-and-thirty school-girls "on the war-path." Afternoon school was over, the day scholars gone home, and the boarders, out in the playground for the last half-hour's recess before evening study, were rending the heavens with the deafening, distracting din that five-and-thirty of those rose-cheeked, gold-haired, corseted angels alone know how to raise.
If there was one thing besides its churches for which Petit St. Jacques was famous, it was the establishment of the Demoiselles Chateauroy for young ladies. It stood in the centre of the Rue St. Dominique; and if there was anything to choose in the matter of dulness and respectability among all the dull and respectable streets of the little town, the Rue St. Dominique should be awarded the palm. There were no shops, there were no people; the houses looked at you as you passed with a sad, settled, melancholy mildew upon them; the doors rarely opened, the blinds and curtains were never drawn; prim little gardens, with prim little gravel-paths, shut in these sad little houses from the street; now and then a pale, pensive face might gleam at you from some upper window, spectre-like, and vanish. The wheels of a passing wagon echo and re-echo down its long silence; the very dogs who sneak out to waggle their tails in the front grass-plot have a forlorn and secret-sorrow sort of air. Take it for all in all, you might travel from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande and not find another so absolutely low-spirited and drearily respectable a street as the Rue St. Dominique. Indeed, as Miss Sydney Owenson often and justly remarked, it was a very poor compliment to St. Dominique to christen it after him at all. Miss Sydney Owenson was one of the Demoiselles Chateauroy's five-and thirty boarders; and it may as well be stated here as elsewhere, had made the Demoiselles Chateauroy more trouble, broken more laws, been condemned to solitary confinement oftener, been the head and front of more frolicsome offendings, and, withal, been better loved by both pupils and teachers during the past three years than the other four-and-thirty put together.
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