was far too much.  On one or two occasions they even laid a rigorous and restraining hand upon activities of which they disapproved, notably when the young officers of the Quebec garrison undertook an amateur performance of Moliere’s Tartuffe in 1694.  At Montreal and Three Rivers, the two smaller towns of the colony, the social circle was more contracted and correspondingly less brilliant.  The capital, indeed, had no rival.

Only a small part of the population, however, lived in the towns.  At the beginning of the eighteenth century the census (1706) showed a total of 16,417, of whom less than 3000 were in the three chief settlements.  The others were scattered along both banks of the St. Lawrence, but chiefly on the northern shore, with the houses grouped into cotes or little villages which almost touched elbows along the banks of the stream.  In each of these hamlets the manor-house or home of the seigneur, although not a mansion by any means, was the focus of social life.  Sometimes built of timber but more often of stone, with dimensions rarely exceeding twenty feet by forty, it was not much more pretentious than the homes of the more prosperous and thrifty among the seigneur’s dependents.  Its three or four spacious rooms were, however, more comfortably equipped with furniture which in many cases had been brought from France.  Socially, the seigneur and his family did not stand apart from his neighbors.  All went to the same church, took part in the same amusements upon days of festival, and not infrequently worked together at the common task of clearing the lands.  Sons and daughters of the seigneurs often intermarried with those of habitants in the seigneury or of traders in the towns.  There was no social impasse such as existed in France among the various elements in a community.

As for the habitants, the people who cleared and cultivated the lands of the seigneuries, they worked and lived and dressed as pioneers are wont to do.  Their homes were commonly built of felled timber or of rough-hewn stone, solid, low, stocky buildings, usually about twenty by forty feet or thereabouts in size, with a single doorway and very few windows.  The roofs were steep-pitched, with a dormer window or two thrust out on either side, the eaves projecting well over the walls in such manner as to give the structures a half-bungalow appearance.  With almost religious punctuality the habitants whitewashed the outside of their walls every spring, so that from the river the country houses looked trim and neat at all seasons.  Between the river and the uplands ran the roadway, close to which the habitants set their conspicuous dwellings with only in rare cases a grass plot or shade tree at the door.  In winter they bore the full blast of the winds that drove across the expanse of frozen stream in front of them; in summer the hot sun blazed relentlessly upon the low roofs.  As each house stood but a few rods from its neighbor on either side, the colony thus took on the appearance of one long, straggling, village street.  The habitant liked to be near his fellows, partly for his own safety against marauding redskins, but chiefly because the colony was at best a lonely place in the long cold season when there was little for any one to do.