The memory of the courageous heart-high peasantry that first peopled and
made home of a wilderness, remains fresh in the present-day Acadia.
The garden-plots cleared upon the uplands near their homes, their
orchards laid out in rugged rows, still bloom for us who know that
country. We still find the roads leading to the dykes by the rivers,
even traces of the trails originally reaching back to the wild pastures;
the dykes upon which so much time and labor were expended season after
season--an arduous work when Acadia's population was yet so small. The
wild luxurious beauty of the place to-day, its blossoms, its fruit, its
vivid dunes, its picturesque water-ways, the daily romance of the
rushing tide for which the little boats thirst on the sand hour by
hour--bring back afresh the quaint pictures of its early days. The quiet
grazing cattle might still be the hardy kine that lived through those
early winters on the abundant after-feed of the settler's dyked lands.
Every aspect of the place, the almost hidden ruins here and there,
Evangeline's well, the rough stone cross that marks the grave of a
village, the virility of the bronze Evangeline, make real the pathos of
this people now scattered broadcast through America, in whose souls the
love of their country, Acadia, is as potent now as then. Neither time
nor the Deportation have caused them to lose their identity as a
distinct people, for a quarter of a million in America are the same
Acadians who went into exile from Nova Scotia from 1755 to 1763.