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ACADIENSIS

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.