1884.] Lancaster in Acadie and the Acadiens in Lancaster. 239
to develop a truth, and no faster than the minds of the people were prepared to receive it. Cheer up, Marble, we are with you and doing all we can.
"Your guide,
"Tom Veal."
Another communication, from C. B. Long, contains the following: "The names of Hiram and Edwin Marble will live when millions of years shall, from this time, have passed, and when even kings and statesmen shall have been forgotten."
And so the man and, after him, his son worked on till, so far as they were concerned, death closed the scene. Whether any person in the years to come will follow these misguided laborers, and take up the work where they left it, is a question.
The legendary lore of Dungeon Rock is eclipsed by the dominant impulse of lives absorbed in an idea, based upon supernatural agency. While it is an evidence of a misguided zeal, unequaled by anything the whole world has heretofore probably known, in and of itself it is no mystery.
The mystery is that there ever lived human beings to undertake such an unpromising work, where such hardship and perseverance were required, and where the folly of any hope of success must have been apparent to an intelligent person every day, from the commencement to the close of the twenty-seven years of servile toil.
LANCASTER IN ACADIE AND THE ACADIENS IN
LANCASTER.
By Henry S. Nourse.
It is almost one hundred and thirty years
"... since the burning of Grand-Pre,
When on the falling tide the freighted vessels
departed,
Bearing a nation, with all its household gods,
into exile;
Exile without an end, and without an example
in story."
Of the numerous readers of Evangeline in Lancaster, few now suspect how nearly the sad tale of wantonly-ravaged Acadie touched their own town history. From the archives of Nova Scotia all details of that deed of merciless treachery were left out, for very shame; but upon the crown officials then in authority over the Province, history and poetry have indelibly branded the stigma of an unnecessary edict of expulsion, which devastated one of the fairest regions of America, and tore seven thousand guileless and peaceful people from a scene of rural felicity rarely equaled on earth, to scatter them in the misery of abject poverty, among strangers speaking a strange tongue and hating their religion. The agents who faithfully executed the cruel decree were Massachusetts men, reluctantly obedient to "his Majesty's orders," given them specifically in writing by Charles Lawrence, Governor of Nova Scotia.
On the twentieth of May, 1755, Lieutenant-Colonel John Winslow embarked at Boston with a force of about two thousand men, organized in two battalions. They were enlisted for the term of one year, unless sooner discharged, for the special service of
