ago.  Church spire, convent walls, religious foundations occupy the most prominent site in every city and town and hamlet of Quebec.  From Tadousac to Montreal, from Labrador to Maine or New Hampshire, you can follow the thread of every river in Quebec by the glitter of the church spires round which nestle the hamlets.  No matter how poor the hamlet, no matter how remote the hills which slope wooded down to some blue lake, there stand the village church with its cross on the spire, the whitewashed house of the cure, the whitewashed square dormer-windowed school.

Outside Quebec City and Montreal, Quebec is the most reposeful region in all America.  What matter wars and rumors of wars to these habitants living under guidance of the cure, as their ancestors lived two hundred years ago?  They pay their tithes.  They attend mass.  At birth, marriage and death—­the cure is their guide and friend.  He teaches them in their schools.  He advises them in their family affairs.  He counsels them in their business.  At times he even dictates their politics; but when you remember that French is the language spoken, that primary education is of the slimmest, though all doors are open for a promising pupil to advance, you wonder whether constant tutelage of a benevolent church may not be a good thing in a chaotic, confused and restless age.  The habitant lives on his little long narrow strip of a farm running back from the river front.  He fishes a little.  He works on the river and in the lumber camps of the Back Country.  He raises a little tobacco, hay, a pig, a cow, a little horse and a family of from ten to twenty.  When the daughters marry—­as they are encouraged to do at the earliest possible age—­the farm is subdivided among the sons; and when it will subdivide no longer, there is a migration to the Back Country, or to a French settlement in the Northwest, where another cure will shepherd the flock; and the habitant, blessed at his birth and blessed at his marriage, is usually blessed at his death at the ripe age of ninety or a hundred.  It is a simple and on the whole a very happy, if not progressive, life.  Some years ago, when hard times prevailed in Canada and the manufacturing cities of New England offered what seemed big wages to habitants, who considered themselves rich on one hundred dollars a year—­a great migration took place across the border; but it was not a happy move for these simple children of the soil.  They missed the shepherding of their beloved cure, and the movement has almost stopped.  Also you find Jean Ba’tiste in the redwoods of California as lumber-jack, or plying a canoe on MacKenzie River.  The best fur-traders of the North to-day are half-breeds with a strain of French Canadian blood.