l899-'oo TRANSACTIONS 9 1 



lyorette. You enter a few of these homes. The furniture is 

 scanty and rude. Your eye catches quaint objects ; you observe 

 a child attached to one of those portable cradles which figure in 

 the accounts of early explorers. You speak to the occupants ; 

 but they are old-timers, they cannot answer your questions either 

 in English or French, but fix on you strange, inquisitive looks. 

 On leaving the dwelling, you find on the beach outside, young 

 men preparing to cross over to L,achine in their long boats. In 

 voluble language which sounds like Greek to you, they are ap- 

 parently bantering one another. Should you address these young 

 men, they are well able to answer in broken French or preferably 

 in broken English. 



In many houses the women are busy at beadwork. Those 

 met out of doors have all a blanket as head covering, even the 

 young misses who look a little more to style in dress, and wear 

 finely shaped tanned leather boots. 



Groups of children are playing on the public square facing 

 the quaint church and the old priest's house, the latter dating 

 back to the last century. The lively chatter they are carrying 

 on in their native dialect, is unexpectedly interrupted now and 

 then by some popular American or English tune. 



Is there not an element of pathos in the spectacle of these 

 two groups, originally similar, but in the course of time rendered 

 quite unlike under the sway of conflicting social factors ? Is it 

 not instructive and interesting as well, to see that Huron, 

 betwixt the fertile plain and the rugged mountain and forest 

 tract, kept back by the influence of the latter in the lower forms 

 of labour and property, but, as a further result, permeated and 

 transformed in his home life through the influence of the French 

 Canadian communities occupying the fertile belt. Is it not in- 

 structive and interesting to see that Iroquois, in the centre of the 

 champaign region, constrained at an early date to give up the 

 chase, to take to agriculture and the heavy forms of extractive 

 labour, but, by the very fact, rendered more independent, more 

 isolated, less open, in his home life, to the usages and conceptions 

 of his white neighbours ? 



We travel abroad ; we seek distant climes to satisfy a vain 

 curiosity for some common-place marvel : would we not find 

 greater profit and interest in applying part of the energy so spent 



