The wife of the _habitant_ has also a virtue which is not in high esteem among her sisters of a higher culture, but which is still held in respect among the more primitive communities: she is highly prolific. Families of fifteen children are common among the French-Canadians, and the mother of but a paltry half-dozen feels that she has not done her duty to humanity and her country. Early marriages are the rule among the _habitants_, being wisely encouraged by the priests in the interests of morality. It is a sociable race, and the women vie with each other in promoting the innocent gaiety which makes up a large part of their lives. Because of this love for social merriment as well as of their religious feeling, the fêtes of the Church are celebrated in French Canada as nowhere else in northern America, and the industry of the women is tempered by the frequent holidays which call for enjoyment. Their dress is as a rule simple and, in the further outlying communities, which are chiefly referred to here, frequently entirely of homespun material, the fruit of their own labors. One of the chief traits of the French-Canadians, male and female, is their love of music; yet to the cause of music the women of French Canada have furnished but one noted contribution, Madame Albani, the famous opera singer, who owns birth as one of this people, though hardly as a true _habitante_, in the more limited sense of the word. But music is the greatest passion of the French-Canadians, and the violin holds an honored place in all their communities. It is in the simple pleasure of listening to the music of the violin, or of dancing to its merry strains, that the woman of the habitants finds her chief respite from the toils of her daily life. Such is the most characteristic type of womanhood of the Canada of to-day. It is a good type and a comely; but it is not fitted to endure before the changes which our present culture brings about where it enters. The _habitants_ form the nearest approach to a peasantry, as found in European lands, that this country can show; and peasantry is doomed to extinction, be it sooner or later. In the case of the simple people of French Canada, it would seem that it will be sooner.