As for drink, there were both tea and coffee to be had from the traders; but they were costly and not in very general use.  Milk was cheap and plentiful.  Brandy and wine came from France in shiploads, but brandy was largely used in the Indian trade, and wine appeared only on the tables of the well-to-do; the ordinary habitant could not afford it save on state occasions.  Cheap beer, brewed in the colony, was within easier range of his purse.  There were several breweries in the colony, although they do not appear to have been very profitable to their owners.  Home-brewed ale was much in use.  When duly aged it made a fine beverage, although insidious in its effects sometimes.  But no guest ever came to any colonial home without a proffer of something to drink.  Hospitality demanded it.  The habitant, as a rule, was very fond of the flagon.  Very often, as the records of the day lead us to believe, he drank not wisely but too well.  Idleness had a hand in the development of this trait, for in the long winters the habitant had little to do but visit his neighbours.

The men of New France smoked a great deal, and the women sometimes followed their example.  Children learned to smoke before they learned to read or write.  Tobacco was grown in the colony, and every habitant had a patch of it in his garden; and then as now this tabac canadien was fierce stuff with an odour that scented the whole seigneury.  The art of smoking a pipe was one of the first lessons which the Frenchman acquired from his Indian friends, and this became the national solace through the long spells of idleness.  Such as it was, the tobacco of the colony was no luxury, for every one could grow enough and to spare to serve his wants.  The leaves were set in the sun to cure, and were then put away till needed.

As to the methods of farming, neither the contemporary records nor the narratives of travel tell us much.  But it is beyond doubt that the habitant was not a very scientific cultivator.  Catalogne remarks in his valuable report that if the fields of France were cultivated like the farms of Canada three-fourths of the people would starve.  Fertilization of the land was rare.  All that was usually done in this direction was to burn the stubble in the spring before the land went under the plough.  Rotation of crops was practically unknown.  A portion of each farm was allowed to lie fallow once in a while, but as these fallow fields were rarely ploughed and weeds might grow without restraint, the rest from cultivation was of little value.  Even the cultivated fields were ploughed but once a year and rather poorly at that, for the land was ploughed in ridges and there was a good deal of waste between the furrows.  When Peter Kalm, the famous Scandinavian naturalist and traveller, paid his visit to the colony in 1748 he found ’white wheat most commonly in the fields.’  But oats, rye, and barley were also grown.  Some of the habitants grew maize in great quantities, while