As the St. Lawrence was the roadway of the colony and the means of communication, the seigniories were granted first along its shores and the farms were as close to the river as possible. The shape of a farm was that of a parallelogram with the short end fronting the river. Usually this frontage was nearly a quarter of a mile, and the depth from about a half to three miles with an orchard, meadow, grain and woods. So for purposes of protection, as well as access to fish and water supply, the shores of the St. Lawrence showed a row of whitewashed cottages in contact with the highway, even as it does to-day. This brought about a very interesting land problem, for when the habitant died, his property, according to the French law known as Custom of Paris, was divided into equal parts among his children. Each of these was anxious to have a part of the river front, so that soon some farms were divided into ribbons of perhaps fifty to sixty feet frontage. The habitant each year paid a small fee in money to his seignior and brought him some of the produce of the farm. It was generally on St. Martin’s Day in November and they gathered at the seigniory for a genuine harvest home with games and feasting. The seignior’s house, or the manor house, as it was often called, was the centre of his estate. It was generally built of stone, with four rooms and an attic. Behind the house was a great store room and root house. Nearby was the bake-oven built of stones, mortar and earth, into which the wood was thrust until the oven was heated sufficiently, when the ashes were pulled out and the bread pans inserted. Even to this day in some parts of the Province of Quebec one may see the bake-oven near the roadway and sometimes upon its roof the brown crusted loaves put out to cool. Sometimes there was an oven common to the village, so that even the idea of communal cooking, about which we hear so much these days, is a reversion to early practices in our country. Somewhere near was the grist mill to which all habitants must bring their grain to be ground, and of which the seignior took every fourteenth bushel as his pay. The habitant’s house followed the general plan of that of the seignior’s, long and narrow with projecting eaves and high peaked dormer windows, whitewashed each year, a red roof, and among the green trees it is decidedly picturesque even to this day. There were but few windows as glass was a rarity. The cooking as well as heating was by the open fireplace. The habitant was, and in some respects still is, a very independent person, for the family wove its own cloth, made its own shoes and the knitted toque of many colours, and grew its own tobacco, besides the general produce of the farm. Happy and contented in disposition, fond of music, especially that of the ballad and the dance, they enjoyed the long winter evenings.