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IN PROVINCE OF QUEBEC LAND OF HAND-LOOM & SPINNING WHEEL. By M. Le Tour in the e Christian Science Monitor” French-Canada attracts most visitors to the Dominion, Canada has been called the most Americanised country; but Quebec does not come in that category. Its rivers generate millions of horsepower in electrical energy, but its farm folk still use the spinning wheel, still travel in open carriages behind slow plodding horses, its furrows are still ploughed by ox power, and seigneurs still live in minor estates. This is the province of history, where buildings and custom date back to those romantic days when the “Lillies of France” floated over a young country where the axe rang in newly cleared lots and coureurs de bois traversed unknown wilderness. The old buildings stand, and the old generation still lives much as their ancestors did in those days when the United States was still to be born. In the quiet of rolling hills and wide waters was built a church in that far away year of 1648 at Tadousac. A wooden structure, large enough for the small settlement here at the junction of the St. Lawrence and Saguenay Rivers. Today it still stands, a white painted building in a vastness of hills, where little singing children meet the cruise streams in summer time. French songs of the woods, of the habitants who live here, these youngsters sing in welcome, lining the dock to the earth road which leads to the fashionable hotel and the old settlement with the oldest church on the continent. And as their chansons echo in the silence of the rolling hills, they dart forward, eager little beings, for the pennies and silver offered for this unusual reception of old Quebec. Blue hills form the massive background for France in Canada. Endless rolling stretches, hazy purple as far as the eye . can reach, smooth and finished here, taking the shape of jagged cliffs rising sheer out of the water on the upper Saguenay River. Always hills, seldom adorned’ even by homes or hotels:* Hills which speak of age and bring the days of the pioneer near at hand. Now evergreen clad slopes and then grass covered rolling pastures, often with but a few cabins in a hollow, the only sign of man’s conquest of this vast region. The old and the new are close together in the Province of Quebec. On the heights of Quebec City rise modern skyscrapers, apartments, hotels and office buildings. Below and all around are narrow old streets where there is room for but one-way traffic, and that a tight squeeze. And across the broad St. Lawrence, five miles by ferry, is the Isle of Orleans, where automobiles have not yet made their tracks, where bread is still baked in open air ovens, where the dog cart is the most populous vehicle on the roads.
Here, as at Murray Bay, and other habitant villages, the spinning wheels whir to make yarn for the handlooms which make home-spun cloth, mats, tapestries, and the other comforts of the home. Foot and hand power here operate crude machines, some many hundreds of years old, handed down from generation to generation. And in the homes are hooked rugs, embroideries, laces, the handiwork of women long departed, of French Canadian pioneers whose descendants still cling to the patois of their forebears, now one of.the two official languages of the-Dominion. In the cities, old France still lives
too. Motor cars have not entirely replaced the caleche with its easy going steed, and bound to be busy this year with sightseeing busses banned for the duration to conserve gasoline and tires French is heard on the streets as much as English, and street names are announced more frequently in French, Signs and newspapers and magazines in French add to the foreign flavour. Narrow cobblestone streets, with houses alongside reminiscent of pictures of long ago, can easily be found by the most casual visitor.
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Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 November 1942, Page 4
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661OLD WAYS CONTINUE Wairarapa Times-Age, 27 November 1942, Page 4
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