The Family
Spoke With Great Sympathy Of John, A Young French Canadian, "A Gentlemanly
Young Fellow," They Called Him, Who Had Been Much In Their Family, And Who
Had Just Come From The North, Looking Quite Ill.
He had been in their
service every summer since he was a boy.
At the approach of the warm
weather, he annually made his appearance in rags, and in autumn he was
dismissed, a sprucely-dressed lad, for his home.
On Sunday, as I went to church, I saw companies of these young Frenchmen,
in the shade of barns or passing along the road; fellows of small but
active persons, with thick locks and a lively physiognomy. The French have
become so numerous in that region, that for them and the Irish, a Roman
Catholic church has been erected in Middlebury, which, you know, is not a
very large village.
On Monday morning, we took the stage-coach at Middlebury for this place.
An old Quaker, in a broad-brimmed hat and a coat of the ancient cut,
shaped somewhat like the upper shell of the tortoise, came to hand in his
granddaughter, a middle-aged woman, whom he had that morning accompanied
from Lincoln, a place about eighteen miles distant, where there is a
Quaker neighborhood and a Quaker meeting-house. The denomination of
Quakers seems to be dying out in the United States, like the Indian race;
not that the families become extinct, but pass into other denominations.
It is very common to meet with neighborhoods formerly inhabited by
Quakers, in which there is not a trace of them left.
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