10 INCEEASED USE OF THE OAT. 



year, the cultivation of oats has more than doubled ; and 

 yet, in 1849, nearly four thousand bushels of oatmeal, 

 and six thousand of raw oats, have been imported. The 

 extended culture and consumption of the oat is a favour 

 able circumstance as regards the future welfare of the 

 country, both because the climate is well suited to this 

 kind of grain, and because the meal formed from it is an 

 eminently valuable and nutritious food. 



Up the Tatagouche Kiver new settlements are extend 

 ing, which have already reached the third concession. I 

 visited these settlements, and drove up the river as far 

 as an abandoned manganese mine, which is close to an 

 interesting fall of the river, where it partly cuts its way 

 through, and partly falls over, the edges of hardened 

 slate-rocks. The soil is of third-rate quality, being 

 composed generally of the sandy and gravelly drift of 

 the red sandstones, with here and there a patch of deep- 

 red loam, as we should expect from the breaking up of 

 such rocks, and the sorting of their ingredients by flow 

 ing water. The settlers, also, are an inferior class to 

 what I had seen twenty miles farther north. They con 

 sist of French and Irish chiefly, with a very few Scotch 

 men who have failed in lumbering, and who have 

 taken to farming, not with a will, but as a pis-aller. 



There is a good deal of squatting in this neighbour 

 hood ; and men buy and sell their holdings as squatters, 

 though they have no legal title to the land. So far, 

 however, the squatter is safe, as, according to provincial 

 law, whoever subsequently buys the land from Govern 

 ment must pay him for his improvements. They thus 

 have a sort of tenant-right, such as the Irish exercise or 

 claim at home. 



The French settlers here, as elsewhere, uniformly run 

 out their land in cases of succession, subdivide their 

 farms into long ribbons and are an easy, easily-satis 

 fied, good-natured race. They never seek employment 



