e has left behind her what
seem likely to be more permanent memorials of her occupation. The
picturesque banks of the St. Lawrence, from the Atlantic to the great
lakes of the West, are the home of a large and rapidly increasing
population whose language and customs are so many memorials of the old
regime whose history has taken up so many pages of this story.

[Illustration: Street in a French Canadian village near Quebec.]

The tourist who travels through the province of Quebec sees on all
sides the evidence that he is passing through a country of French
origin. Here and there in Quebec and Montreal, or in some quiet
village sequestered in a valley or elevated on the Laurentian Hills, he
sees houses and churches which remind him of many a hamlet or town he
has visited in Brittany or Normandy. The language is French from the
Saguenay to the Ottawa, and in some remote communities even now English
is never spoken, and is understood only by the cure or notary. Nor is
the language so impure or degenerated as many persons may naturally
suppose. On {438} the contrary, it is spoken by the educated classes
with a purity not excelled in France itself. The better class of
French Canadians take pride in studying the language of the country of
their ancestors, and are rarely guilty of Anglicisms, though these have
necessarily crept into the common parlance of mixed communities, where
people are forced to speak both French and English. In some rural
districts, isolated from large towns, the people retain the language as
it was spoken two centuries ago--though without the accent of the old
provinces of their origin--and consequently many words and phrases
which are rarely now heard in France, still exist among the peasantry
of French Canada, just as we find in New England many expressions which
are not pure Americanisms but really memorials of old English times.
In French Canada the Anglicisms are such as occur under the natural
condition of things. The native of old France has no words for
"clearing" the forest, making maple sugar, "blazing" a way through the
woods or over the ice and snow of the rivers and lakes, and
consequently the vocabulary of the French Canadian has been
considerably enlarged by local circumstances. In the summer resorts of
the lower St. Lawrence the influence of the English visitors, now very
numerous, is becoming more evident every year, and French habits are
becoming modified and the young folks