In Quebec

If music in the South was formal and surrounded with cold, music in the North was warm and humble, made gay by the climbing spring. At the Chateau Frontenac, in Quebec, was held the second annual Canadian Folk Song and Handicraft Festival.

For this festival Wilfred Pelletier, of the Metropolitan Opera Company, had arranged the production of the first known comic opera, Le Jen de Robin et Marion, written by Adam de la Halle 700 years ago, in the century of the troubadours.

The most notable performers at the festival were old men, peasants who had endured the rigors of more than 60 Canadian winters and who, this year as in every other, felt quickened to jubilance by the steady stir of the spring wind.

Jacques Garneau, the champion dancer of Quebec province, spun and hopped, snapped his gnarled fingers, and clapped his hands.

Johnny Boivin, the champion "violon-neux" of the province, bent to his old fiddle and played his songs. They were none of them insipid tunes or silly ones-- he played the songs which women sing for spinning, the slow songs sung in the fields by men working, songs for stars and ploughshares.

Pheleas Bedard was a mime as well as a singer. His little face was covered with a tufty white beard above which two tiny eyes were set like shoebuttons. He often lifted his eyebrows in an arch grimace, to show that the rhyming words had a double meaning.