And yet, with all these evidences of the capacity of the race for civilization before us, the chances are largely in favor of its ultimate and speedy extinction. There is an element of wildness in the Indian blood, which breaks out suddenly after long periods of quiet, and like the wild birds of the woods, it seems to languish and lose its reproductive energy by domestication. The races for whom Eliot prepared his Indian Bible have passed away so entirely, that only one person is said to be now living who can read or understand it. The great confederacy of the six nations which stood so long between the hostile French and English, occupying what is now the center of the State of New York, is wasted to a few insignificant shadows. The Delawares, once the most numerous and powerful of the Eastern tribes, have long since passed away; and of the Seminoles, the Creeks, and dozens of other great bodies, scarcely a handful remains.

Farnham, in his "Oregon and the Rocky Mountains," tells of his surprise at meeting in a hunting lodge, hundreds of miles away from civilization, a graduate of Yale College, living with his companions the rude life of a trapper, wearing the Indian dress, and apparently without a thought beyond the pursuits of the day. Upon irquiring how, having so abundantly fitted himself for higher purposes, he could be contented with his present life, he declared, "I must always be able to take and cook my own game, to make my own fire, and to out-travel my own horse, or I am no Indian. An Indian I was born, and an Indian I am going to die." Too many of his people are of the same opinion.

The French Canadians.
Riding. Toboggins.

1. Canada.

Their Simple Habits. Evangeline. The Cities. Sleigh

ITH a good deal of justice, it has been remarked, that the only contented people in North America were the French Canadians. The Anglo-or German-or Irish-or Scotch-American, is restless and anxious to improve his situation; to gain for his children a higher position upon the social ladder than his own. But the resident of the Canadian provinces, the descendant of the heroic men who came so near founding a French Colonial Empire in the western world, seats himself contentedly by the ample fire place in his log cottage, rears a numerous family, as merry, as kind hearted, and as careless of the future as himself. He lives upon the land his father and grand-father, and great grand-father have owned before him. He tills it in an easy negligent way, just enough to get bread for his family, and a little surplus for clothing and-whisky. His boys and girls grow up around him, and if there is room enough upon the paternal acres, seldom disturb themselves to look further. If there is not, they drift into the first opening that offers; and become lumbermen, or raftsmen, or choppers. If a tree falls in their path, they go round it. If a breach is made in their fence, they are as likely to back one of the queer one-horse carts, which are peculiar to French Canadian husbandry, into the gap, as to set about repairing it in a workman-like manner. The owner of a thousand acres of land will live in a low roofed log cabin, with one or two rooms upon its floor, without a thought of discomfort or inconvenience. Their wants are few and simple, their capacity for enjoyment enormous. On the old stage route from Niagara to Detroit, before the completion of the railway,

the French taverns by the way side were among the few diverting incidents of the long and weary journey. Little log cabins with a single room and a shed kitchen, planted exactly in the outer line of the great road, would display some such sign as the following:

THE HIVE.

"In this Hive we're all alive,

'Tis whiskey makes us funny, And if you're dry, step in and try The flavor of our honey."

Driving up to the door of one of these hostelries in the evening, a merry laughing crowd surrounds the stage in a moment, the music of a fiddle floats through the open door, and jolly good natured young fellows in their work day dress, and pretty black eyed girls with dark hair,and smiles revealing rows of perfect teeth, are seen whirling away in the dances their forefathers brought with them from "the pleasant land of France." Every one is happy; and even whiskey, of which all drink freely, is usually insufficient to disturb the prevailing good humor. The beautiful picture which Longfellow painted in the beginning of his "Evangeline," of the simple peace and happiness of the Acadians, may be seen with very little alteration in hundreds of the Canadian hamlets of the present day.

"Still "in the midst of its farms, reposes the Canadian village,
Strongly built are the houses, with frames of oak and hemlock.
Such as the peasants of Normandy built in the reign of the Henries,
Thatched are the roofs, with dormer windows and gables projecting,
Over the basement below, protecting and shading the doorway.
There, in the tranquil evenings of summer when brightly the sunset
Lights up the village street, and gilds all the vanes on the chimneys,
Matrons and maidens sit in snow white caps, and in kirtles,

Scarlet and blue and green, "and though the distaffs no longer spin the golden
Flax for the gossiping looms, whose noisy shuttles within doors,
Mingle their sound with the whirr of the wheels, and the songs of the maidens"
Still "Down the street comes the parish priest, and the children
Pause in their play to kiss the hand he extends to bless them."

The laborers still are greeted upon their return from the field with the sound of the Angelus, pealing from the belfry far over the

roofs of the village; while columns of pale blue smoke, ascending like clouds of incense, rise from the cottage hearth the homes of peace and contentment without locks to their doors, or bars to their windows, and the Evangelines of the present day are as fair, and almost as innocent as

"That maiden of seventeen summers," whose eyes were

"Black as the berry that grows on the thorn by the wayside,

Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses;
Sweet was her breath as the breath of kine that feed in the meadows,"

Like her, they may still be seen

"Wearing their Norman caps and their kirtles of blue, and their earrings,
Brought in the olden times from France, and since as dear heirlooms,
Handed down from mother to child, through long generations."

The "broad wheeled wains and antique plows and harrows; the folds for the sheep" still cluster round the farmstead, and in armchairs with faces clumsily carved in oak upon their lumbering backs, still sit the old farmers, singing the songs their fathers sung in the Norman orchards and Burgundian vineyards. Patriarchs may be found among them, "bent but not broken with years," with "shocks of yellow hair" flowing over their shoulders "like the silken floss of the maize," "fathers of twenty children" each, and upon whose knees "more than a hundred children's children have sat," listening to the "tales of the

Loup-garou in the forest

"And of the goblin that came in the night to water their horses,
And of the white Letiche, the ghost of a child who unchristened,
Died, and was doomed to haunt unseen the chambers of children;
And how on Christmas eve the oxen talked in the stable,
And how the fever was cured by a spider shut up in a nutshell,

And of the marvellous powers of four-leaved clover and horse-shoes.”

Much of this pastoral simplicity and beauty still remains among the Canadians of the lower provinces. They speak a patois, corrupted from the language of their mother country, and many of them have refrained in stolid pride from learning the tongue of their conquerors. Their only literature is the prayer-book of their church; their priest is still their teacher, counsellor and guide, and they seem, in the midst of the more energetic English and Scotch and Yankees who surround

them, like beings of another creation. Toward the English, indeed, they exhibit a passive antagonism which a hundred and twenty years of association has not mitigated. Neither side cares to understand

or appreciate the other; and but for the wonderful vitality and reproductive energy of the French blood, the whole race of "habitans " might have by this time been overgrown or extinguished. Instead of