[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 curé 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 commence to speak English fairly well. Away from the St. Lawrence, however, and the path of the tourists, the French Canadians remain, relatively speaking, untouched by English customs.