Fete St. Jean Baptiste – The Montreal Herald Jun. 24, 1863
The annual celebration of this purely French Canadian festival took place yesterday, and was characterized by an unusually large procession, together with the various religious and patriotic paraphernalia peculiar to the occasion. The streets through which the procession moved were decorated with the, on this day, universal maple leaf, and with every description of banner, prominent among which latter were the tri-color and the union jack. Banners were stretched across the street in several localities, in festoons, and taken together with the ever-moving but always numerous throng of ladies in the gayest colors of a people who naturally love brilliant hues, the spectacle was one of extraordinary cheerfulness. The day was strictly in character with the festival scenes in the streets, the sky being cloudless, and the atmosphere of vitreous clearness.
