Acadiensis/Volume 2/Number 4/A Milestone

ITH this number closes the second volume of Acadiensis. Another year has come and gone, during which the subscription list has been increased by about fifty names, but, with the effort to provide a better magazine, with more and better illustrations, the expenses have at least correspondingly increased, resulting again in a debit balance of about two hundred dollars.

This is not as it should be, and, if each of the present subscribers could secure one additional name, the fund would be sufficiently increased, not only to pay all costs of publication of the magazine as at present issued, but to provide more pages and illustrations, to the direct benefit of all who are connected with the enterprise.

There has been no lack of assurance that the work has been both a literary and an artistic success. Then, why not a financial success as well? The question naturally occurs, should the work be abandoned? Why waste time and money in catering to the supposed wants of an unappreciative public? Far better to let matters take their course than to struggle against the inevitable.

​The other night, just after retiring to rest, down at his cottage by the sea, the writer heard the clear ringing silvery notes of a bugle giving the order for "lights out" over at Fort Dufferin, where a company of soldiers were encamped.

Like a writer in a recent number of the Erudite, a longing arose for a silver bugle with which to blow a message to a drowsy world. Listening to that bugle, thoughts arose of Madame La Tour, asleep in an unmarked grave by the bank of a noble river, of her work well done, of that sad Easter morn, nearly three hundred years ago, when well and bravely, at the head of her little garrison, she had fought her last fight, and met defeat, dying as she had lived. Thoughts of the early Acadians, and of all that they had suffered, of how they had crept stealthily back to begin life anew, hidden away in the recesses of the forest, and how they had lived and multiplied and prospered, until their descendants had become a power in the land. What an irony of fate there seemed in the fact that the very descendants of the men who had so sternly cast them out of the land of their adoption should later themselves be obliged to seek an asylum among them.

This thought, in turn, carries one on to the days of the Loyalist forefathers of our city, who had, indeed, founded it upon a rock, and, like Madame La Tour, had laid them down, many of them within sound of that same bugle call, there to await the time when the trumpet of the angel of the resurrection shall summon all to final judgment.

How one longs for the magic pen of a Haliburton, the gifted eloquence of a Joseph Howe, or the poetic fire of a Longfellow, that a record might be left behind to be enshrined in golden characters upon the history of our country.

​In the words of the writer before alluded to, if we had a bugle instead of a pen, and if we could stand out under the stars on a hushed summer night and deliver our message through its silver throat, perhaps the world that reads might be thrilled into earnest purpose more readily than when it is exhorted from a pencil point or a quill.

Patience and energy and determination will accomplish much. We cannot all be eloquent, we cannot all be learned, we cannot all wield a golden pen, but if we do as best we may that which seems to be our appointed task, our work cannot surely fail of recognition hereafter, even though our bodies, like that of Madame La Tour and so many of those others to whom reference has been made, should lie in an unmarked grave. At least all can be brave, as well becomes true soldiers in this world's struggle.

Well, it seemed that scarcely an hour had passed when again was heard that bugle sounding. Cheerily the reveille aroused the echoes from hill to hill in the morning air. Down at the fort the soldiers were up and doing, preparing each for his allotted task. The sun had come up bright and clear above the horizon, superseding the darkness and the dawn. The whole world looked brighter. The clouds which seemed to line the horizon had disappeared. Was it a providential admonition? Surely it must have been, for new hopes seemed to take the place of old doubts and fears, and new aspirations to evolve themselves out of gloom and chaos. Out of the silvery notes of that early morning bugle arose the determination that there should be no turning back from the battle, and that, buoyed and sustained by the force of the example of that noble woman, "a record should be left behind to be read and enshrined in golden characters upon the tablets of memory."