Of offices in the gift of the village voter those in the Church are the most highly esteemed. To be a municipal councillor or a school commissioner is indeed all very well. But the village council is not really very important. It spends only a few hundred dollars a year and to keep up the roads is not an exciting task. The village council rarely has even the "town hall" usual in other communities; it meets in the "salle publique," or the vestry, of the Church, or in the school house. The school commissioners too have no very dazzling work to do. The cure is sometimes their chairman and thus in some degree they come under the control of the Church. The commissioners appoint the teachers in the schools and keep up the school buildings, but their outlay is also very small, for the salaries of teachers, usually women, are appallingly low. The really important elective office in the parish is that of churchwarden (_marguiller_). In the church the churchwardens have a special seat of honour assigned to them. They control the temporalities and may beard even the cure himself. Large sums of money pass through their hands. They receive the pew rents,--and every habitant has a pew; they receive the voluntary offerings. It often happens that the Church accumulates large sums of money and that, if the building of a _presbytere_ or parish church is decided upon, there is enough on hand to pay for it outright. The municipal council and the schoolboard, on the other hand, are always poor. The habitant watches their taxation with a parsimonious scrutiny and it is a thankless task to carry on their work.