Shuttle and Linen Yarn.
Along these roads comes the oddest assortment of vehicles ever seen, I should think, in one district of the Dominion. The habitant carries home his hay in a two-wheeled cart, fitted with a rack and drawn by a rough pony or a yoke of deliberate oxen; and he rides to church or market in a springless conveyance, which is a kind of grotesque compromise between a “top-buggy” and a “buckboard.” When coming from work, however, he contents himself with a humbler vehicle, rattling down the stony slopes at a surprising pace in a little cart drawn by a lean, rough-coated, stout-limbed dog.
A little farther along the same road you may see a stray automobile, while on the other side of the fence run the electric cars of the Quebec Railway Light & Power Company, or occasionally, on the same line, a train of “steam-cars.”
Weaver’s Bench.
All the country near Quebec is well supplied now with railroads, and the townsfolk are learning to follow the modern fashion of living in country cottages during the summer months. Quebec merchants leave the city by the evening trains to spend their leisure hours with their families at Charlesbourg, Lorette, Montmorency, or some equally interesting but till lately inaccessible place. Others take the small modern steamboats which ply up and down the shores of the St. Lawrence, or to and from the beautiful Island of Orleans, and which have to make their way carefully past great rafts of lumber, fleet “ocean greyhounds,” or quaint barges of the same pattern as those used by Wolfe in his attack upon Quebec. These newcomers into the country bring new fashions, which in course of time will have their effect upon the habitants; but their influence is as yet scarcely perceptible.
Bobbins used in weaving.
Women in broad-brimmed straw hats are still seen in the hay-fields at work beside the men, yet they find time for much labor at loom and spinning-wheel, besides keeping well scrubbed and scoured the old floors and simple furniture, which have rendered good service to their mothers and grandmothers before them.