The habitants of rural Quebec cling as tenaciously to the life and atmosphere transplanted here from rural France more than three centuries ago, as the inhabitants of Quebec city cling to the atmosphere of ancestral French cities.
Here are the wayside ovens, the wayside crosses and shrines, the old grist-mills, with water-wheel and upper-and-nether millstones. Here are towers and windmills descended from Seigneurie times. Here are century-old wool-carding mills with the ancient sign “Moulin a carde” over the doorway.
Here are the little maisons with whitewashed sides and steep-curving roofs whose birth-certificates date back to the days of the first settlers. Hundreds of years old are these little habitant houses, but because of the tender care they have received, they are, to-day, as clean and fresh, within and without, as though built but yesterday. Canada is rich in having in her possession such a sweet type of architecture as these dear little farm-houses of the Province of Quebec. She is rich, too, in the quaint French villages clinging to the straggling, long highway, which as street culminates in l’eglise, or the Parish church.
Quebec is especially rich in its atmospheric landscape, a landscape so dear to the habitant heart that outstanding features have become personalities. Thus, Montmorenci Falls is called “La Vache”—the Cow. A landscape too, where peaceful church-spire is seldom out of sight of church-spire. And all are within hail of some river—Saint Lawrence, Richelieu, Saint Francois, or the Saguenay.
In the matter of place-names Quebec is not behind Newfoundland, except that her taste runs to figures of the church rather than to figures of the sea. Every Saint in the calendar must, we think, have a village namesake in Quebec. On the north side of the Saint Lawrence, L’Ange Guardien, Saint Anne, Saint Joachim, Saint Gregoire, strike a balance with Saint Henri, Saint Fabien, Saint Hilaire on the south.
And if the villages be strung together aerially by church-spires, no less are they united by the quaint roads, whereon oxcart and dog-cart are as frequent as that of le cheval—roads flanked by the roof-curving, French farm-houses homing the crafts of carding, dyeing, spinning and weaving.
The spinning-wheel and the loom are not “has-beens” in the Quebec home, by-gones relegated to the attic—but intimate pieces of furniture actively a part of everyday life. And so when you step over one of these thresholds, it is to find madame spinning—her clever fingers feeding so fast from the distaff that the wheel flies around in a blur of motion; or, to find her in the room under the eaves sitting at her loom, in her hand the flying-shuttle, about her, everywhere, on chairs and boxes and overflowing to the floor, balls of yarn of all sizes and colours.
And when Madame is not weaving her “couverts” or “tapis”, she is toying with wool in some one of its preparatory stages from the sheep’s back to the finished homespun. Or she may even be caring for the home sheep, bringing up a lamb by hand or something of that sort. The habitant women are never at a loss for work.
And when Madame is not thus engaged one may happen upon her in the shade of some dooryard-tree, sitting before a homemade quilting-frame, busily quilting her hand-pieced coverlets of artistic, original designs. On these occasions she is accompanied by her little daughter of six or seven years, daintily tracing the thread-line with her little fingers in imitation of “Mama”.
In these habitant homes, Grandmere’s busy fingers take much of the knitting for the grand famille in hand. Grandmere it is, too, who moulds the high-coloured peaches, grapes, apples, plums, “hands”, and what-not figures, from the wax that is the by-product of the honey-making, home-bees.