As for the other services which the habitant had to render his seigneur, they were of little importance.  When he caught fish, one fish in every eleven belonged to his chief.  But the seigneur seldom claimed this share, and received it even less often.  The seigneur was entitled to take stone, sand, and firewood from the land of any one within his estate; but when he did this it was customary to give the habitant something of equal value in return.  Few seigneurs of New France ever insisted on their full pound of flesh in these matters; a generous spirit of give and take marked most of their dealings with the men who worked the land.

Then there was the maypole obligation, quaintest among seigneurial claims.  By the terms of their tenure the habitants of the seigneury were required to appear each May Day before the main door of the manor-house, and there to plant a pole in the seigneur’s honour.

   Le premier jour de mai,
      Labourez,
   J’m’en fus planter un mai,
      Labourez,
   A la porte a ma mie.

Bright and early in the morning, as Gaspe tells us, the whole neighbourhood appeared, decked out fantastically, and greeted the manor-house with a salvo of blank musketry.  With them they bore a tall fir-tree, its branches cut and its bark peeled to within a few feet of the top.  There the tuft of greenery remained.  The pole, having been gaudily embellished, was majestically reared aloft and planted firmly in the ground.  Round it the men and maidens danced, while the seigneur and his family, enthroned in chairs brought from the manor-house, looked on with approval.  Then came a rattling feu de joie with shouts of ‘Long live the King!’ and ’Long live our seigneur!’ This over, the seigneur invited the whole gathering to refreshments indoors.  Brandy and cakes disappeared with great celerity before appetites whetted by an hour’s exercise in the clear spring air.  They drank to the seigneur’s health, and to the health of all his kin.  At intervals some guest would rush out and fire his musket once again at the maypole, returning for more hospitality with a sense of duty well performed.  Before noon the merry company, with the usual round of handshaking, went away again, leaving the blackened pole behind.  The echoes of more musket-shots came back through the valleys as they passed out of sight and hearing.  The seigneur was more than a mere landlord, as the occasion testified.

CHAPTER V

HOW THE HABITANT LIVED

The seigneurs of New France were not a privileged order.  Between them and the habitants there was no great gulf fixed, no social impasse such as existed between the two classes in France.  The seigneur often lived and worked like a habitant; his home was not a great deal better than theirs; his daily fare was much the same.  The habitant, on the other hand, might himself become a seigneur by saving a