rode complacently beside their girls. The two-wheeler predominates in
Canada, and is of all styles and sizes. After we left the stone road,
we began to encounter the hills that are preliminary to the mountains.
The farms looked like the wilder and poorer parts of Maine or New
Hampshire. While Joe was getting a supply of hay of a farmer to take
into the woods for his horse, I walked through a field in quest of wild
strawberries. The season for them was past, it being the 20th of July,
and I found barely enough to make me think that the strawberry here is
far less pungent and high-flavored than with us.

The cattle in the fields and by the roadside looked very small and
delicate, the effect, no doubt, of the severe climate. We saw many rude
implements of agriculture, such as wooden plows shod with iron.

We passed several parties of men, women, and children from Quebec
picnicking in the "bush." Here it was little more than a "bush;" but
while in Canada we never heard the woods designated by any other term.
I noticed, also, that when a distance of a few miles or of a fraction
of a mile is to be designated, the French Canadian does not use the
term "miles," but says it's so many acres through, or to the next
place.

This fondness for the "bush" at this season seems quite a marked
feature in the social life of the average Quebecker, and is one of the
original French traits that holds its own among them. Parties leave the
city in carts and wagons by midnight, or earlier, and drive out as far
as they can the remainder of the night, in order to pass the whole
Sunday in the woods, despite the mosquitoes and black flies. Those we
saw seemed a decent, harmless set, whose idea of a good time was to be
in the open air, and as far into the "bush" as possible.