Page:Yankee in Canada (1866) Thoreau.djvu/50

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44
A YANKEE IN CANADA.

him, dans les États-Unis; and so we bowed him into his house again. I was surprised to find a man wearing a black coat, and with apparently no work to do, even in that part of the world.

The universal salutation from the inhabitants whom we met was bon jour, at the same time touching the hat; with bon jour, and touching your hat, you may go smoothly through all Canada East. A little boy, meeting us, would remark, "Bon jour, Monsieur; le chemin est mauvais" Good morning, sir; it is bad walking. Sir Francis Head says that the immigrant is forward to "appreciate the happiness of living in a land in which the old country's servile custom of touching the hat does not exist," but he was thinking of Canada West, of course. It would, indeed, be a serious bore to be obliged to touch your hat several times a day. A Yankee has not leisure for it.

We saw peas, and even beans, collected into heaps in the fields. The former are an important crop here, and, I suppose, are not so much infested by the weevil as with us. There were plenty of apples, very fair and sound, by the roadside, but they were so small as to suggest the origin of the apple in the crab. There was also a small red fruit which they called snells, and another, also red and very acid, whose name a little boy wrote for me "pinbéna" It is probably the same with, or similar to, the pembina of the voyageurs, a species of viburnum, which, according to Richardson, has given its name to many of the rivers of Rupert's Land. The forest trees were spruce, arbor-vitæ, firs, birches, beeches, two or three kinds of maple, bass-wood, wild-cherry, aspens, &c., but no pitch pines (Pinus rigida). I saw very few, if any, trees which had been set out for