June, that of the Sacred Heart, in November, “the month of the dead,” special prayers are said.  On Sunday evenings the family chant the Canticles.  The Church’s feasts are marked by festal signs such as the laying of the best rugs on the floor.  If there is drought groups gather frequently at the Calvaires to pray for rain.  Occasionally such supplications have a curiously commercial basis in frugal minds.  A habitant’s wife, learning that a near neighbour had made an offering to the cure for prayers for rain, declared that she would give nothing, since if rain fell on the neighbour’s farm it would not stop there:  “S’il mouille chez les Pierrot Benjamin, il mouillera ben icitte."[32]

In each year, if he chooses, the habitant has a good many chances to cast his vote.  The Church, the greatest institution of the village has its annual election—­that for a churchwarden; of the three churchwardens one retires every year.  An annual election there is also for the municipal council, two or three of whose members retire each year.  This body looks after the highways, the granting of licenses to sell spirituous liquors and so on.  Annually also are elected school commissioners, who have charge of education.  The municipal council and the school commission are comparatively new institutions in the Province of Quebec.  They have been borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon world, but the habitant takes kindly to the elector’s privileges and struggles are sometimes keen.  The innovation of the ballot not having been adopted, as yet, in municipal elections, the voting is open.  Every voter must thus show his preferences and when a moral question, such as the licensing of drinking places, is before the electors this open voting aids the Church’s influence.  Usually the cure is an ardent temperance man and to vote for a license against his wishes, made known perhaps from the pulpit, needs great strength of conviction.  It thus happens that a very large number of parishes in the Province of Quebec have no licensed drinking places.

Of offices in the gift of the village voter those in the Church are the most highly esteemed.  To be a municipal councillor or a school commissioner is indeed all very well.  But the village council is not really very important.  It spends only a few hundred dollars a year and to keep up the roads is not an exciting task.  The village council rarely has even the “town hall” usual in other communities; it meets in the “salle publique,” or the vestry, of the Church, or in the school house.  The school commissioners too have no very dazzling work to do.  The cure is sometimes their chairman and thus in some degree they come under the control of the Church.  The commissioners appoint the teachers in the schools and keep up the school buildings, but their outlay is also very small, for the salaries of teachers, usually women, are appallingly low.  The really important elective office in the parish is that of churchwarden (marguiller).