Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/249

Rh expedient of causing a fog to hide the vessel of her friends. She rendered barren women fruitful, and once or twice cured the dumb; by her efforts attempts to plant Jansenism in the colony were frustrated; she also brought to naught the designs of stray Huguenots. At the siege of Quebec Wolfe dispatched an expedition to harry the river parishes. "Wherever resistance was offered," says Parkman, "farmhouses and villages were laid in ashes, though churches were generally spared." The church at Beaupré was not spared by the troops; it was set on fire three times, but each time Saint Anne extinguished the flames, and some of the Highlanders confessed the miracle. When the north shore down to Cap Tourmente was blazing, nearly all the farmhouses in which she was specially venerated escaped.

But since 1860 or 1865, when the rush of population to the New England factories set in and French Canada began to receive at second hand the new ideas absorbed by the emigrants, the saint has been comparatively listless. She cures headache and dyspepsia, converts Protestants with Catholic wives, finds employment for clients, protects them while traveling, restores lost objects, procures young women admission to convents, and endows those who come to her in a proper spirit with grace and strength to quit evil practices. Now and then we hear of a hysterical girl being cured on the spot, or of an epileptic finding relief, but as a matter of fact the character of the miracles has deteriorated since faith in them has been shaken by New England influences. Hence the rather bitter remark, attributed to Mgr. Bégin, that if the French Canadians are supplanting the Puritan stock, Puritanism is having its revenge in French Canada.

Formerly images of Saint Anne were carried in procession through a parish to bring on rain or to stop rain, a ceremony that reminded one of the old Roman religion and the transportation of Bacchus, Ceres, and Dea Dia through the fields and vineyards by white-clad youths, followed by the lustral water and the full incense box. The practice is falling into desuetude; the habitant, like the rest of us, is beginning to be satisfied with the weather as it comes, and to have confidence in the predictions of the meteorological office. A bad crop is still attributed to the backsliding of the farmers or to the nonpayment of tithes. In French Canada the tithe, collectable by law and a first lien on the soil, is every twenty-sixth bushel of cereals. Of late, since the opening of the western prairies, the habitants have dropped cereal growing and taken to raising hay for the United States market. In this manner the curés have been cheated out of tithes, and some in whom the sense of reverence must have been dim pointed to the McKinley bill, which levied a duty of four dollars per ton, as an expression of the divine wrath.