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discovery of an ancient city found fifty feet under ground and brought to light by excavations. True, there had been some talk of the Acadians of other days, an inoffensive little people who had been snatched in time of peace from their hearths, despoiled of their property, crowded together in the hold of sailing vessels, and dispersed over many seas to perish; but the world remembered them only as it might remember a long trail of blood, seen some tranquil evening in the heavens for a brief space, and then hidden forever by dense black clouds; as it might remember a noted ship-wreck, fragments of which are found long after the disaster floating upon the deep; as it remembered, because of the "voice heard in Rama," the children of Juda put to death by the order of Herod the cruel. The excess of their misery had astonished the world, and then the silence of forgetfulness settled over their tomb, the great silence of death.

It was believed that they were annihilated for all time. In Longfellow's beautiful "Evangeline," published in 1847, their contemporary history is sketched thus:

M. Rameau de Saint-Pére, who perhaps has done more than all other writers to make known to forgetful France her lost colonies in America, wrote in 1859, in the preface of a book which was a revelation, not only to European readers but to ourselves: "Who remembers Acadia?"^[1]

It was not only in the United States and in France, however, that the Acadians were believed to be a people of the past, completely destroyed; even in our sister-province, Quebec, the best-informed and most sym-