CHAPTER XII.

ACADIE AND EVANGELINE.

WE

began our tales of the Pathfinders with

a romance, we shall end them now with

a tragedy. We are all familiar with the touching poem of our great poet, Longfellow, entitled Evangeline. I suppose that we have read it many times, and have dropped tears as the trials of the heroine and her lover were brought so strikingly before our eyes. We have walked with them through the forest primeval, and with them have tried to pierce the mazes of the oozy bayous of Louisiana. We have probably execrated the British officer who forced the unoffending people of Nova Scotia from their homes and carried them over seas to a hopeless exile. The poetry of the story is sufficiently familiar to our minds. Now we are to study the matter-of-fact history,

which we shall find a little different, though not

less sad.

Our studies have already told us that for a long time there was a struggle between the French and the English for the continent of America, and that the French had in solemn form taken possession of the greater portion of the territory, leaving their opponents but a strip along the sea coast. In the year 1710, the English had made themselves masters of the region known as Nova Scotia, or Acadie, which had been settled by the French years before the first settlement was made in New England. France never obtained possession of this region again, and thus in 1755, the year of which I have to write now, the people had been for more than forty years under British rule. They had been mildly governed, and had been asked many times to take the usual oath of allegiance to Great Britain. This they constantly refused to do. They naturally wished to appear to remain neutral in the struggle that was going on between the two great nations across the ocean. Their children grew up

under the rule of England, but speaking the French

language and following French customs. They professed the religion that the French professed, too. This was not all. They sympathized with their own countrymen, of course, and did not always carefully practice the neutrality that they professed, for they traded with the enemies of the government that protected them, and they even went so far at one time as to take up arms against the Crown.

Often the question arose in New England, "What shall be done to make the Acadians take the oath of allegiance and act as the British subjects that they are by treaty?" The priests said to them, "Better surrender your meadows to the sea, and your houses to the flames, than at the peril of your souls, take the oath of allegiance to the British government." This was the advice that kept them in antagonism to the British, as well it might, but it is said that the officers were sometimes so arrogant that they incensed the people and made them still more opposed to taking the oath. Of course the Americans and English looked upon all the Acadians as "rebels," and we know that lit

tle mercy is accorded by military forces to such. There was good ground for this feeling, too, for by the terms of surrender, in 1710, the people ought to have taken the oath of allegiance and fidelity to her sacred Majesty of Great Britain." Soon after the treaty of Utrecht (which was signed in 1714, four years after the acquisition of Acadie by the English), there was some correspondence regarding removing the people from Nova Scotia because they still refused to take the oath, but the step was not taken, and time and again was the effort made to bring them to see that they were in the wrong.

England seems sometimes to have paid little attention to her colony at Nova Scotia and the French were made bold by the want of action. Six years after the treaty of Utrecht, the Governor wrote home: "The inhabitants seem determined not to sware allegiance, at the same time I observe them goeing on with their tillage and buildings as if they had no thoughts of leaving their habitations; it is likely they flatter themselves that the King's affaires here will allwayes continue in the same feeble state. I am certain nothing but demonstration will convince

them to the contrary." (It will be noticed that Governors in those days did not always spell their words as we do now.) The Governor went on to say that he was sorry to have to recommend a course that seemed to be expensive, but that he thought it would be more to the honor of the Crown to give the country back to the French than to be contented with the name only of government. A few months later, he wrote that the French inhabitants had been suffered so long to indulge in disobedience that it had become a habit and that they had "not only multiplied and become numerous, but withall insolent."

Seven years later still, another Governor wrote that the missionary priests" instil an inculcated hatred into both Indians and French inhabitants against the English."

When George the Second came to the throne, it was necessary that the oath of allegiance should be taken to him, but this the French still refused to do. In 1730, the Board of Trade wrote to the Governor that those who refused the oath ought to esteem it a mark of the King's clemency that they