x Preface

those of an aboiteau; within ten miles of Crapaud and fifteeen of Bedeque and Malpeque, all of which perpetuate French names and serve as mute remind- ers of ruined French hopes. The school in which I learned to read was on the left bank of Cape Trav- erse River and the voice of my first schoolmaster used to blend through the open window with the sound of the mowers in the marshes as they cut the hay which was once an object of so much solicitude to the Acadian immigrants. Here too I memorized Longfellow’s Evangeline and tried to picture the liv- ing Acadians on the banks of the stream from which the pungent smell of marsh-hay came as an aid to the imagination. As I grew older and developed an inter- est in history as distinct from legend and in histori- cal justice as distinct from patriotism, I searched in vain for a continuous or detailed account of the Aca- dians in my island home. At last I decided that I should undertake the task myself, and this volume is the result.

Throughout the volume I have been constantly impressed by the difficulty of elevating individual pioneer efforts to the plane of history and by the equally difficult task of making a consecutive narra- tive out of detached letters and occasional docu- ments, but I believe that I have exhausted all avail- able information and that I have set down nothing as fact that is not sufficiently authenticated. My dis- cussion of the oath of allegiance and of the expulsion of 1755 is introduced not as a solution of these prob- lems but rather to show their effect upon Acadian