“These Canadian French,” said the farmer, “come swarming upon us in the summer, when we are about to begin the hay-harvest, and of late years they are more numerous than formerly.  Every farmer here has his French laborer at this season, and some two or three.  They are hardy, and capable of long and severe labor; but many of them do not understand a word of our language, and they are not so much to be relied upon as our own countrymen; they, therefore, receive lower wages.”

“What do you pay them?”

“Eight dollars a month, is the common rate.  When they leave your service, they make up their packs, and bring them for your inspection, that you may see that they have taken nothing which does not belong to them.  I have heard of thefts committed by some of them, for I do not suppose that the best of the Canadians leave their homes for work, but I have always declined to examine their baggage when they quit my house.”

A shower drove us to take shelter in a farm-house by the road.  The family spoke with great sympathy of John, a young French Canadian, “a gentlemanly young fellow,” they called him, who had been much in their family, and who had just come from the north, looking quite ill.  He had been in their service every summer since he was a boy.  At the approach of the warm weather, he annually made his appearance in rags, and in autumn he was dismissed, a sprucely-dressed lad, for his home.

On Sunday, as I went to church, I saw companies of these young Frenchmen, in the shade of barns or passing along the road; fellows of small but active persons, with thick locks and a lively physiognomy.  The French have become so numerous in that region, that for them and the Irish, a Roman Catholic church has been erected in Middlebury, which, you know, is not a very large village.

On Monday morning, we took the stage-coach at Middlebury for this place.  An old Quaker, in a broad-brimmed hat and a coat of the ancient cut, shaped somewhat like the upper shell of the tortoise, came to hand in his granddaughter, a middle-aged woman, whom he had that morning accompanied from Lincoln, a place about eighteen miles distant, where there is a Quaker neighborhood and a Quaker meeting-house.  The denomination of Quakers seems to be dying out in the United States, like the Indian race; not that the families become extinct, but pass into other denominations.  It is very common to meet with neighborhoods formerly inhabited by Quakers, in which there is not a trace of them left.  Not far from Middlebury, is a village on a fine stream, called Quaker Village, with not a Quaker in it.  Everywhere they are laying aside their peculiarities of costume, and in many instances, also, their peculiarities of speech, which are barbarous enough as they actually exist, though, if they would but speak with grammatical propriety, their forms of discourse are as commodious as venerable, and I would be content to see them generally adopted.