Crusaders of New France eBook

William B. Munro
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 168 pages of information about Crusaders of New France.

Crusaders of New France eBook

William B. Munro
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 168 pages of information about Crusaders of New France.

Behind each house was a small addition used as a storeroom.  Not far away were the barn and the stable, built always of untrimmed logs, the intervening chinks securely filled with clay or mortar.  There was also a root-house, half-sunk in the ground or burrowed into the slope of a hill, where the habitant kept his potatoes and vegetables secure from the frost through the winter.  Most of the habitants likewise had their own bake-ovens, set a convenient distance behind the house and rising four or five feet from the ground.  These they built roughly of boulders and plastered with clay.  With an abundance of wood from the virgin forests they would build a roaring fire in these ovens and finish the whole week’s baking at one time.  The habitant would often enclose a small plot of ground surrounding the house and outbuildings with a fence of piled stones or split rails, and in one corner he would plant his kitchen-garden.

Within the dwelling-house there were usually two, and never more than three, rooms on the ground floor.  The doorway opened into the great room of the house, parlor, dining-room, and kitchen combined.  A “living” room it surely was!  In the better houses, however, this room was divided, with the kitchen partitioned off from the rest.  Most of the furnishings were the products of the colony and chiefly of the family’s own workmanship.  The floor was of hewn timber, rubbed and scrubbed to smoothness.  A woolen rug or several of them, always of vivid hues, covered the greater part of it.  There were the family dinner-table of hewn pine, chairs made of pine saplings with, seats of rushes or woven underbark, and often in the corner a couch that would serve as an extra bed at night.  Pictures of saints hung on the walls, sharing the space with a crucifix, but often having for ominous company the habitant’s flint-lock and his powder-horn hanging from the beams.  At one end of the room was the fireplace and hearth, the sole means of heating the place, and usually the only means of cooking as well.  Around it hung the array of pots and pans, almost the only things in the house which the habitant and his family were not able to make for themselves.  The lack of colonial industries had the advantage of throwing each home upon its own resources, and the people developed great versatility in the cruder arts of craftsmanship.

Upstairs, and reached by a ladder, was a loft or attic running the full area of the house, but so low that one could touch, the rafters everywhere.  Here the children, often a dozen or more of them, were stowed away at night on mattresses of straw or feathers laid along the floor.  As the windows were securely fastened, even in the coldest weather this attic was warm, if not altogether hygienic.  The love of fresh air in his dwelling was not among the habitant’s virtues.  Every one went to bed shortly after darkness fell upon the land, and all rose with the sun.  Even visits and festivities were not at that

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Crusaders of New France from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.