familiar forms moving upon the marshlands. With resignation they turned back from Minas, and on the shores of la baie Saincte Marie, in the Clare District south of Digby, and in territory east of Yarmouth took up the broken strands of their existence as tillers of the earth and ploughers of the sea.
To-day the Acadians are a nation within a nation. In the Maritime Provinces, 150,000 descendants of the French pioneers of 1632 dwell at peace. Their emblem, the tri-colour with the Virgin's Star in the blue, floats below the English flag. Unmolested they observe national forms. Their youths attend Acadian colleges. Every four years conventions are held at the Feast of the Virgin to vote upon issues of mutual interest. Four Acadian journals are published.[1] A national literature is maturing. Jacques et Marie, a story of the Exile, is the best-loved prose classic. No poetical work is so much read as Longfellow's Evangeline.
Judge Haliburton as a young man represented in the Provincial Assembly the old County of Annapolis which then included Digby and Clare townships. He declared before the Legislature that the Acadians were "unambitious and frugal, they live within their means; devoted to their old form of worship, they are not divided by religious
- ↑ Le Courier des Provinces—Maritimes, Bathurst, l'Evangeline, Moncton, l'Impartial, Tignish, P. E. I., and Moniteur—Acadien, Shediac.
