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 curé 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 curé, 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.

If you take a look at the map of Quebec under its new boundaries up
into Labrador--it seems absurd to call a region three times the area of
Germany "a province"--you will see that only the fringe of the river
fronts has been peopled. This is owing to the old system of parceling
out the land in mile strips back from the river--a system that
antedated the railroads, when every man's train was a paddle and the
waterfront. Beyond, back up from the rivers, lies literally a
no-man's-land of furs plentiful as of old, of timber of which only the
edge has been slashed, of water power unestimated and of mineral
resources only guessed. It seems incredible at this late date that you
can count on one hand the number of men who have ascended the rivers of