favourably received by the press and public both in England and America,
and my friends were justified in thinking, and in saying, that I was at
home in French Canada and gave the impression of mastery of my material.
If mastery of material means a knowledge of the life, and a sympathy with
it, then my friends are justified; for I have always had an intense
sympathy with, and admiration for, French Canadian life. I think the
French Canadian one of the most individual, original, and distinctive
beings of the modern world. He has kept his place, with his own customs,
his own Gallic views of life, and his religious habits, with an assiduity
and firmness none too common. He is essentially a man of the home, of
the soil, and of the stream; he has by nature instinctive philosophy and
temperamental logic. As a lover of the soil of Canada he is not
surpassed by any of the other citizens of the country, English or
otherwise.

It would almost seem as though the pageantry of past French Canadian
history, and the beauty and vigour of the topographical surroundings of
French Canadian life, had produced an hereditary pride and exaltation--
perhaps an excessive pride and a strenuous exaltation, but, in any case,
there it was, and is. The French Canadian lives a more secluded life on
the whole than any other citizen of Canada, though the native,
adventurous spirit has sent him to the Eastern States of the American
Union for work in the mills and factories, or up to the farthest reaches
of the St. Lawrence, Ottawa, and their tributaries in the wood and timber
trade.

Domestically he is perhaps the most productive son of the North American
continent. Families of twenty, or even twenty-five, are not unknown,
and, when a man has had more than one wife, it has even exceeded that.
Life itself is full of camaraderie and good spirit, marked by religious