Page:1898 NB Magazine.djvu/170

Lawrence erected the scaffold for the Acadians, Akins wished to dower them with the shame as well.

At the date of the treaty of Paris (1763) there was no longer an Acadia; nor, alas! were there Acadians. Cape Breton, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island had been successively ceded to England; and the Acadians, having fallen into the cowardly, odious ambuscade of 1755, "the great trouble," as they still call it—these defenders of the faith never coined a term of hatred to designate their persecutors—had been first imprisoned, then robbed, and finally scattered to the four winds of heaven to be annihilated.

They were dead, in the estimation of those nationalities who had taken their places and their property; and they themselves ignored whether they were ever again to enjoy national assistance. Those who had returned from their exile, and others who, long hidden in the woods, had succeeded in surviving their privations and escaping their executioners, sought, now that the treaty of Paris ceded everything to England, and that they were too unfortunate to be feared and too poor to be robbed, isolated localities not far from the scenes where they had formerly found happiness and peace,—sought such localities in order to live, and above all to die, there. Thus did the first Christians hidden in subterranean Rome timidly emerge upon learning of the death of a Nero or a Caligula.

There is a tradition to the effect that three of the vessels in which they had been huddled foundered in mid-ocean. In any case, a careful calculation establishes the fact that not fewer than 8,000 of them perished in the vessels' holds, in the prisons, in the depths