my residence in Canada, and whom I conjectured must have been
_habitans_. Up the Gatineau and down the St. Lawrence, it would be
easy to find whom I wanted, but I preferred to wait on in town. I
had many a disappointment. One day it would be a cabman, another day
a clerk. Though they all _looked_ French, they invariably turned
out to be English or Scotch. My notions of hair and skin and eyes
were being all turned upside down; my favorite predispositions
annulled, my convictions changed to fallacies--in short I was
thoroughly bewildered. I could not find my _habitant_. At the same
time, when I did find him, he would have to know how to speak some
English, for I could only speak very little French. I read it well
of course, wrote it quite easily, but on essaying conversation was
always seized with that instinctive horror of making a fool of myself,
which besets most Englishmen when they would attempt a foreign
language. Besides, the _patois_ these people spoke was vastly
different from ordinary French, as taught in schools and colleges,
and what it might be like I had not in those days the faintest idea,
not having read Rabelais.
The worst _desillusionnement_ I suffered I will recount. One day I
noticed an elderly man clad in corduroy trousers, shabby brown
velveteen coat, conical straw hat and dirty blue shirt, lounging
about a wharf I sometimes frequented where, at one time, would lay
from thirty to fifty barges laden with lumber. Bargetown it might
have been called; it was a veritable floating colony of French and
Swede, Irish and Scotch, jabbering and smoking by day and lying
quietly at night under the stars, save for the occasional jig and
scrape of the fiddle of some active Milesian. Here, had I fully
known it, was my chance for observation, but I was ignorant at that
time of the ways of these people and did not venture among them. But
the man in the velvet coat interested me. He gesticulated the whole
time most violently, waved his arms about and made great use of his
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