34 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



liall." She became contented only when she took the veil, and coiild 

 summon tlie community to its daily duties by ringing the bell at four 

 o'clock in the morning — an office she performed without a break for 

 forty years. Another; nun of this period, who came from the most com- 

 fortable home the (colony then had. was Geneviève de Boucherville, 

 whose fatlier's note-book contains the significant entry : — " The land be- 

 ing,' mine, I think it my duty to settle there as a means of being useful 

 to society." This anti-absentee landlord, Pierre Boucher de Boucher- 

 ville, was tjhe father, grandfather and great-grandfather of Ursuline 

 nuns ; for, besides Geneviève^ three of the next and four of the following 

 generation took the veil. His piety was proverbial, and its memor}- was 

 kept alive for many 3^ears by the custom his descendants had of meeting 

 to hear his " spirilhial will " read aloud on the anniversary of his 

 death. They were a long-lived family. Pierre Boucher was bom during 

 the life-time of Shakespeare; yet his Ursuline daughter did not die till 

 the life-time of the Duke of Wellington. 



The other classes of society shared the novel pleasure of this time 

 of peace and comparative plenty. From the convent windows the nuns 

 could see the snug little whitewashed cottages strung along the Côte de 

 Beaupré — that well-named " shore of the beautiful meadow," which 

 rose two hundred feet or more in one bold bluff from the St. Lawrence, 

 and then, in evenly rising uplands, swept back to the Laurentians, 

 twenty miles away. Or they could look out to the left of this, across the 

 valley of the St. Charles, over a still greater natural glacis, sloping up 

 and up t}o the blue ramparts of the same Ijaureutian mountains further 

 west. Here the cottages were clustering round the churches into little 

 straggling villages, which tamed the wild woodlands with fruitful spots 

 of greenery. Or tliey could sec the .harbour, in the right foreground of 

 the Côte de Beaupré, with, beyond, the rich Island of Orleans, bearing 

 at first such native produce that the early settlers chose it as the garden 

 of Quebec, and afterwards bearing such crops that every travellers eye 

 was taken with the scene of bright fertility at this seaward gate of 

 Canada. 



The very troubles of that time were those inflicted by prosperity. 

 Church and State cried out against the increase of luxury. There were 

 laments over the good old times of more frugality, when the liabif>œnts 

 stayed on their farms, instead of crowding the wharves and warehouses 

 to spend their savings, whenever a ship came in from France with a 

 cargo of men's and women's frippery. Young men of more stirring 

 natures tu mod to the wilds for profit and adventure. The paternal 

 government was horrified to see hundreds of coureurs des hois " absent 

 without leave." And the Church was more justifiably grieved to find 



