Next to the commandant in power came the priest.  He bore unquestioned rule over his congregation, but only within certain limits; for the French of the backwoods, leavened by the presence among them of so many wild and bold spirits, could not be treated quite in the same way as the more peaceful habitants of Lower Canada.  The duty of the priest was to look after the souls of his sovereign’s subjects, to baptize, marry, and bury them, to confess and absolve them, and keep them from backsliding, to say mass, and to receive the salary due him for celebrating divine service; but, though his personal influence was of course very great, he had no temporal authority, and could not order his people either to fight or to work.  Still less could he dispose of their laud, a privilege inhering only in the commandant and in the commissaries of the villages, where they were expressly authorized so to do by the sovereign.[28]

The average inhabitant, though often loose in his morals, was very religious.  He was superstitious also, for he firmly believed in omens, charms, and witchcraft, and when worked upon by his dread of the unseen and the unknown he sometimes did terrible deeds, as will be related farther on.

Under ordinary circumstances he was a good-humored, kindly man, always polite—­his manners offering an agreeable contrast to those of some of our own frontiersmen,—­with a ready smile and laugh, and ever eager to join in any merrymaking.  On Sundays and fast-days he was summoned to the little parish church by the tolling of the old bell in the small wooden belfry.  The church was a rude oblong building, the walls made out of peeled logs, thrust upright in the ground, chinked with moss and coated with clay or cement.  Thither every man went, clad in a capote or blanket coat, a bright silk handkerchief knotted round his head, and his feet shod with moccasins or strong rawhide sandals.  If young, he walked or rode a shaggy pony; if older, he drove his creaking, springless wooden cart, untired and unironed, in which his family sat on stools.[29]

The grades of society were much more clearly marked than in similar communities of our own people.  The gentry, although not numerous, possessed unquestioned social and political headship and were the military leaders; although of course they did not have any thing like such marked preeminence of position as in Quebec or New Orleans, where the conditions were more like those obtaining in the old world.  There was very little education.  The common people were rarely versed in the mysteries of reading and writing, and even the wives of the gentry were often only able to make their marks instead of signing their names.[30]