The climate is healthy, though admittedly cold in winter. “During the four coldest months of the year,” I quote from an official publication, “the average temperature is 15 degrees Fahrenheit in December, 10 in January, 10 to 15 in February, and 20 to 25 in March. There are some days when the mercury drops as low as 20 to 30 degrees below zero, but the atmosphere is so dry that but little discomfort is experienced, even by those who indulge in winter sports in the coldest weather.” There is no question that the dryness of the atmosphere makes an immense difference in the extent to which one feels the cold, and though I cannot speak from experience of a Quebec winter, I know that many people do prefer the crisp cold of the Dominion’s oldest province to a damper and milder climate. Quebec has the advantage of having plenty of snow, which makes winter travelling easy and delightful. It also “protects the grass and autumn-sown grain from damage by frost, and, as in England, tulips and crocuses which have remained in the ground all winter, push their green shoots through the disappearing snow-banks in the early spring.” Of course, however, one must dress suitably to the weather. Warm caps, coats, gloves and overshoes are necessary, especially for driving, in Lower Canada; the “habitants” wear blanket coats, girt round the waist with a coloured sash, and woollen caps which can be pulled down over the ears and neck—a costume which is at once so sensible and so picturesque, that a modification of it has been adopted nearly all over Canada for the little folk and by their elder brothers and sisters for snow-shoeing and ski-ing. But Quebec is not only a land of ice-palaces and deep snow. It has its hot months as well as its cold ones, and often the latter follow the former so quickly that “the rapidity of vegetation is marvellous. Peas and beans ripen six weeks after being sown. The thermometer sometimes registers 70 degrees and over in the month of May; and in the early part of July, 1911, it stood at over 80 in the shade at Quebec for several days together.” When the writer first set foot in Montreal, it was the second week in September, and coming in from the sea, in a season when the icebergs had been adrift in large numbers, it would have seemed that summer still reigned, had it not been for such a wealth of fruit—pears, apples, peaches, grapes—everywhere in evidence, as only autumn can produce. In population, Quebec comes second to Ontario. The census of 1911 showed a total of nearly two million three thousand persons, of whom the males outnumbered the females by almost twenty thousand; and the gain during the preceding decade was greater than in any other eastern province. Four-fifths of the people in Quebec are French-speaking, and of these 70 per cent. live in villages and rural districts.