A primitive and interesting race are the French Canadians of these coasts. Many of their villages, and churches--the latter with very steep roofs, generally painted red--have a quaint, antiquated air, and some of the settlements hereabouts are really of very remote date. Wind-bound for a couple of days at one of the oldest and queerest of these villages, on a forlorn little bay, not far from the Saguenay, I went ashore to observe the manners and customs of the place. By the threshold of every house there lay two or three pair of huge wooden clogs, looking almost like "dug-out" canoes, and into these the people popped their feet when the roads were muddy, and their occupations obliged them to go out of doors. A large wooden crucifix stood by the roadside near the entrance of the village, with a small space around it enclosed by a wooden railing. Young girls in wide-brimmed straw hats were kneeling at the foot of it, and I noticed that they had left their clogs outside the railing. Presently an old woman came along, and she too deposited her dug-outs reverently outside the little sanctuary before she entered. These roadside crosses are to be met with everywhere in the French Canadian settlements, many of them curiously fitted up as shrines, and decorated with votive offerings. The valley in which this little village stood had a pastoral appearance, but the hills to the north of it were of a wild and dreary character, suggesting endless tracts of wilderness beyond their dark ridges.