Let me here tell a fact too honorable to the people of Beauport to be omitted. As soon as the demon of intemperance was driven from my parish, I felt that my first duty was to give my attention to education, which had been so shamefully neglected by my predecessors that there was not a single school in the parish worthy of that name. I proposed my plan to the people, asked their co-operation and set to work without delay.
I began by erecting the fine stone school house near the church, on the site of the old parsonage. The old walls were pulled down, and on the old foundation a good structure was soon erected with the free collections raised in the village. But the work was hardly half finished when I found myself without a cent to carry it on. I saw at once that, having no idea of the value of education, the people would murmur at my asking any more money. I therefore sold my horse, a fine animal given me by a rich uncle, and with the money finished the building.
My people felt humiliated and pained at seeing their pastor obliged to walk when going to Quebec or visiting the sick. They said to each other; “Is it not a burning shame for us to have forced our young curate to sell his fine horse to build our school houses, when it would have been so easy to do that work ourselves? Let us repair our faults.”
On my return from establishing the society of temperance in St. John, two weeks later, my servant man said to me:
“Please, Mr. le Cure, come to the stable and see a very curious thing.”
“What curious thing can there be?” I answered.
“Well, sir, please come and you will see.”
What was both my surprise and pleasure to find one of the most splendid Canadian horses there, as mine! For my servant said to me: “During your absence the people have raised five hundred dollars and bought this fine horse for you. They say they do not want any longer to see their curate walking in the mud. When they drove the horse here, that I might present him to you as a surprise on your arrival, I heard them saying that, with the temperance society, you have saved them more than five hundred dollars every week in money, time and health, and that it was only an act of justice to give you the savings of a week.”
The only way of expressing my gratitude to my noble people was to redouble my exertions in securing the benefits of a good education to their children. I soon proposed to the people to build another school house two miles distant from the first.
But I was not long without seeing that this new enterprise was to be still more uphill work than the first one among the people, of whom hardly one in fifty could sign his name.