Percé boasts the spinning wheel, with Madame, second to none of her habitant sisters up and down the whole Province, in her mastery of laine.
Among its quaint maisons Percé has an unique figure, happened upon by us nowhere else—the Beachmaster’s Cottage. The Beachmaster as a “character” was unknown to us till we crossed his “stage” at Percé.
Bonaventure Island, too, lies three miles offshore—Bonaventure Island that harbours the memory of Peter Duval of buccaneer fame, skipper of a privateer named the Vulture. How he did harry the French coast during the war with Bonaparte! Who knows but Captain Duval was a connoisseur in Lustreware, who knows but many of the beautiful pieces in the James collection and others in many a home of this shore crossed the seas at his instigation? At any rate, Bonaventure Island, which was his last “ship”, is now skippered by kindred spirits, the wild sea-gulls whose ancestors may many a time have snatched of the crumbs that washed astern from the Vulture’s tables.
CHAPTER XIII.
WAYSIDE CROSSES AND GARDEN SHRINES.
ANISHING roads,” no less than “the broad highway” of rural Quebec, are all more or less edged by wayside crosses and tiny garden shrines. From east to west and north to south the Quebecquois travels a la rue Calvaire.
But this via crucis is by no means a via dolorosa. Far from it! For the habitant does not set up his handmade, roadside cross, abounding with symbols of the crucifixion, in a spirit of sadness, but rather as the expression of a happy life full of rich traditions of such crosses in Old France, brought over by his forefathers, and reproduced here in old Quebec since Cartier’s time.
The wayside cross is now part of the landscape, in the habitant’s eye, and to his mind, a happy calendar by which to notch events. It is in this spirit that the habitant landholders and heads of families in old Quebec set out to carve “the cross” that is the age-old milestone of the roads—the cross by which they will be remembered long ages after they have taken the hill-road to the cimetiere.
The carving is a winter-evening task, begun after the day’s work is over, when the grande famille have all had super. C’est bon. All the family is interested in le pere’s intention to make a new cross. The wood in hand is carefully gone over and the best pieces selected. Measurements are made “according to the cloth” and the sawing and planing begun. Mon Pere’s ideas are rounded out by suggestions from le mere et les enfants. Not one evening but many are consumed, till the winter runs away. And when in the spring all is ready and the new cross is set up, what wonder if it has an individuality all its own? This being the way these roadside crosses grow, there is good reason why not any two are alike.