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Ladies and gentlemen, with your permission, we 

 shall follow the adventurous footsteps of Professor 

 Kalm, in our streets, and round our old city, one 

 hundred and thirty years ago, and take note of what 

 his cicerone, Dr. Gaulthier, may tell him about the " old 

 rock," its inhabitants, customs, &c. Kalm, on his way 

 to the Chateau St. Louis, had to ascend Mountain Hill. 

 Shall we not have a word to say about this, to us 

 very familiar thoroughfare ? Why called Mountain 

 Hill ? 



When Quebec was founded, and for years afterwards, 

 a very rugged footpath led from the strand under Cape 

 Diamond to the lofty area above, where 'the great 

 Indian Chief Donacona no doubt used to bag grouse and 

 hares by dozens, in the day of Jacques-Cartier. On the 

 27th November, 1623, the descent to the Lower Town 

 had been opened out and made more practicable ; we 

 would imagine it must have undergone another levell- 

 ing to admit of the ascent of the first horse, who paced 

 the streets of Quebec, the stud presented from France, 

 as a gift to His Excellency, Charles Huault, de Mont- 

 magny, in 1648. Though horned cattle existed in the 

 colony as early as 1623, oxen were for the first time 

 used to plough, on the 27th April, 1628. Champlain's 

 habitation stood in the Lower Town, on the site where 

 the little Church of JVotre-Bame-de-la-Victoire was 

 subsequently erected. The first European settler in the 

 Upper Town was a Parisian apothecary, by name Louis 

 Hebert, who in 1617, set to clearing some land for 

 agricultural purposes, where now stand the Basilica 

 and the Seminary, and that area of ground extending 

 from Sainte-Famille Street to the Hotel-Dieu. Hebert 

 built himself a tenement, the historian Laverdiere 

 thinks, were the Archbishop's Palace now stands. He 

 also erected a mill (a wind-mill probably) on that point 

 of Saint-Joseph Street which connects with Saint- Fran- 

 cois and Saint-Flavien Streets. Hubert's house and his 

 neighbor, Guillaume Couillard's (the foundations of 



