These little garden shrines, many no larger than the breadbox, are the pride of every habitant home-gardener. The entire household takes an interest—especially grandmere et grandpere. It is the old man’s fancy that every spring mixes the paint and guides the brush that freshens into new life the old colours.
And are they dun colours that he mixes? Most assuredly not!—White and light blue—the colours of the heavens.
The touches of life—the blood, the flesh, the hope—are given with real flowers, picked fresh every morning from the surrounding garden and set—a tiny bouquet votive-offering before the holy figure of “Mary”, “The Son of Mary” or maybe “Bonne Ste. Anne”.
The private gardens fringing the main street of Ste. Anne de Beaupré rival each other in these happy little shrines. All stand on elevations of stone or willow-wood post; and a clinging vine or tall peonies or ambitious poppies or nestling mignonette tone down the newness of the sky-colours and touch with effective life the tiny figure in plaster or bisque that symbolizes the faith of M’sieu and Madame.
In the garden of the summer home of two American ladies, adjoining the highway of Beaupré toward St. Joachim, is a specially attractive little shrine with a collaret of St. Joseph lilies—lilies which, appropriately enough, are always in full bloom, for the fete day of bonne Sainte Anne.
Some of the Quebec cross-makers often cut a niche in the cross in which is set the Christ-figure, the statue being protected from the weather by glass as in the case of the garden shrines. A good example of this is seen in the cross from the Indian village of Caughnawaga across the river from Montreal. This particular cross is further distinguished by the figure of a cock surmounting it.
On the highways of Quebec one likes the way trade salutes the cross. Men and boys passing in their two-wheeled carts find time to lift their hats and busy pedestrians often stop to murmur a prayer at the foot of the cross by the edge of the road. These things are a matter of course in picturesque, thrifty Quebec. They belong as naturally as the St. Lawrence or the Laurentians, but one is surprised on running into Sudbury in Ontario to see there, on the bare rocks high above the tracks, a large grotto, found on closer investigation to contain a life-size figure of “the virgin” as Regina Galloram.
Local men say it was erected by an old French Count, who had been coming to Sudbury for many years prior to 1914, but who failed to come over during the war. They say the Count sat daily in the grotto at the feet of Mary.
Then came the war. And the only word of him since has been the receipt by a townsman of a paper edged in black, as big as the page of a ledger covered with the names of relatives killed in action. Ontario may be proud of its wayside shrine.
At least two other widely separated wayside crosses are to be seen in Western Canada, one, a large crucifix in the Roman Catholic Hospital at The Pas; the other, a crucifix with figures on a platform in the cemetery at St. Norbert, near Winnipeg. There is also a shrine in a little wood at St. Norbert to which it is said small pilgrimages are made. However, it is undoubtedly rural Quebec which carries off the palm for wayside shrines and crosses. Somehow her “milestones” are an historic “part of the landscape”, belonging both to yesterday and to-day.