en there are two families in a household. As always with the
French, family feeling is very strong. As soon as they are old enough
the elder sons may go out into the world; it is usually a younger son
whom the father selects to remain with him on the family property. This
son is free to marry and to him, when the old father dies, the land goes
on condition that he will always keep the door open to members of the
family who may seek its refuge. It is not easy to see how so small a
cottage can discharge these hospitable functions; in addition to adults
there are often, in a French Canadian family, from ten to fifteen,
sometimes twenty or twenty-five children. Through the long winters,
doors and windows remain closed. The family gets on without fresh air
and it gets on also without baths.

Since there are often many hands to do the work habitant farming is
greatly diversified. But improvements come only slowly. Some of the most
fertile areas in Quebec have been half ruined because the habitant would
not learn the proper rotation of crops. Of the value of fertilizing he
has had only a slight idea. His domestic animals are usually of an
inferior breed, except perhaps the horses. Of these he is proud and, no
matter how poor, usually keeps two, an extravagance for which he was
rebuked by successive Intendants under the French regime. In recent
times the French Canadian farmer has been making great progress. He is
pre-eminently a handy man. Though his versatility is lessening, to this
day, in some of the remoter villages, he buys almost nothing; he is
carpenter, farmer, blacksmith, shoemaker; and, if not he, his wife is
weaver and tailor. The waggon he drives is his handiwork; so is the
harness; the home-spun cloth of his suit is made by his wife from the
wool of his own sheep: it is an excellent fabric but, alas, the young
people now prefer the machine-made cottons and cloths of commerce and
will no longer wear homespun. Sometimes the habitant makes his own
boots, the excellent _bottes sauvages_ of the country. The women make
not only home-spun cloth, but linen, straw hats, gloves, candles, soap.
When there are maple trees, the habitant provides his own sugar; he
makes even the buckets in which the sap of the maple tree is caught.
Tobacco grows in his garden, for the habitant is an inveterate smoker:
sometimes the boys begin when only five years old or less. The women and
the girls, indeed, do not smoke and an American visitor,