There has been no dying-out of the race among the French Canadians. They number twenty times the thousands that they did a hundred years ago. The American soil has left their physical type, religion, language, laws, and habits absolutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling villages, dance to the fiddle, after mass on Sundays, as gayly as once did their Norman sires, and keep up the fleur-de-lys and the memory of Montcalm. More French than the French are the Lower Canadian _habitants_. Not only here, but everywhere, a French “dependency” is France transported; not a double of the France of to-day, but a mummy of the France of the time of the “colony‘s” foundation. In Säigon, you find Imperial France; here the France of Louis Quatorze. The Englishman founds everywhere a New England--new in thought as in soil; the Frenchman carries with him to California, to Japan, an undying recollection of the Palais Royal. In San Francisco there lives a great French capitalist, who, since 1849, has been the originator of every successful Californian speculation. He cannot speak a word of English, and his greatest pleasure, in a country of fruits and wine, is to bid his old French servant assure him, upon honor, that his whole dessert, from his claret to his olives, has been brought for him from France. There is much in the colonizing instinct of our race, but something, perhaps, in the consideration that the English are hardly happy enough at home to be always looking back to what they have left in the old country. There is about this old France something of Dutch sleepiness and content. There is, indeed, some bustle in the market-place, where the grand old dames, in snowy caps, sit selling plums and pears; there is much singing made over the lading of the timber-ships; there are rafts in hundreds gliding down the river; old French carts in dozens, creaking and wheezing on their lumbering way to town, with much clacking of whips and clappering of wooden shoes. All these things there are, but then there are these and more in Dol, and Quimper, and Morlaix--in all those towns which in Europe come nearest to old France. There is quiet bustle, subdued trade, prosperity deep, not noisy; but the life is sleepy; the rafts float, and are not tugged nor rowed; the old Norman horses seem to draw the still older carts without an effort, and the very boys wear noisy shoes against their will, and make a clatter simply because they cannot help it.