Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 3, 2025
There the storms appear to culminate, pouring out the full vials of their wrath upon the devoted habitans of white-cotted Charlesbourg. The wayfarer who wends through this rustical district will hardly fail to observe the prevailing taste for lightning-rods.
The Commissaries of the Army, in other words the agents of the Grand Company, had swept the settlements far and near of their herds, and the habitans soon discovered that the exposure for sale in the market of the products of the dairy was speedily followed by a visit from the purveyors of the army, and the seizure of their remaining cattle.
You might have noticed flights of steps to the doors of the habitans? That was a provision against snowing time; and another proof of the severity of the frost is that any mason work not bedded at least three feet deep into the earth is dislodged by the April thaws. 'Now what would you say to freezing up your winter stores of meat and fowls? They're obliged to do it in Lower Canada.
There, flitting round the door, or occasionally peering through the windows of the tap-room, with pipes in their mouths and perchance a tankard in their hands, were seen the elders of the village, boatmen, and habitans, making use, or good excuse, of a rainy day for a social gathering in the dry, snug chimney-corner of the Tilly Arms.
A species of communism seems to be a portion of the French character; for we discover, that, even at that early day, paysans, or habitans, collected together in villages, had their common fields, where the separate portion of each family was still a part of the common stock and their tract of pasture-land, where there was no division, or separate property.
The tower was now disused and partly dilapidated, but many wonderful tales existed among the neighboring habitans of a secret passage that communicated with the vaults of the Chateau; but no one had ever seen the passage still less been bold enough to explore it had they found it, for it was guarded by a loup-garou that was the terror of children, old and young, as they crowded close together round the blazing fire on winter nights, and repeated old legends of Brittany and Normandy, altered to fit the wild scenes of the New World.
At Lorette, it divides the village in twain: a western section, for the most part peopled by French-Canadian habitans; an eastern one, inhabited by half-breed Indians, a remnant of the once powerful Hurons of old. These Canadian Hurons are not, in their present condition, corroborative of the Cooper specifications of Indian life: rather the contrary, in fact.
But when they became habitans or settlers, and took wives, their surnames appeared for the first time in the marriage-contract; so that it was a proverb in the islands, "You don't know people till they marry." The institution of marriage was not introduced among the Buccaneers for many years after their settlement of the western coast.
The wandering poor, who are known to the piety of the habitans as the Brethren of Christ, were a terror to Bird, in their visits, when they came by day to receive the charity which no one denies them; he felt himself bound to keep a watchful eye on this old Yankee, who was either a rascal or a madman, and perhaps both, and to see that no harm came to him; and when he heard the tramps prowling about at night, and feeling for the alms that kind people leave out-doors for them, he could not sleep.
A row of white cottages, forming a loosely connected street, clustered into something like a village at the point where the parish church stood, at the intersection of two or three roads, one of which, a narrow green track, but little worn by the carts of the habitans, led to the stone house of La Corriveau, the chimney of which was just visible as you lost sight of the village spire.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking