GRAND PRÉ AND EVANGELINE
One of the pleasantest features of New Scotland is the
number and variety of its wild-flowers. Outside the dwellings
in “the Valley” one’s eye constantly met with and
was refreshed by the sight of the white rose. The woods
are full of violets. The ponds and marshes reek with
perfume and colour, I shall never forget the advent at
each station on the line of half-a-dozen vociferous urchins
bearing bunches of long-stemmed water lilies. “Pond
lilies—fresh picked pond lilies. Fifteen cents a bunch!”
Behind this youth came another, at an interval of five paces.
“Beautiful fresh pond lilies. Ten cents a bunch.” And
still another. “Pond lilies, five cents a bunch.” The
train was about to move. “All aboard!” shouted the
conductor. The flower merchants showed a sudden parity
and unanimity in their demands. “Pond lilies—five a
bunch,” they cried in chorus. Then, as the train began
to move, one small boy, rather pale and bright-eyed, looking
as if his chief and favourite nutriment were chewing-gum,[5]
looked up into my face, extended his scented wares under
my very nose, and blurted out breathlessly: “Here, take
’em, mister. Beautiful and fresh. Two bunches for five!”
[Footnote 5: Of this delectable composition, one of those blessings
which, like the phonograph and the sky-scraper, the world owes
to America, the variety now most in vogue is called, for some
mysterious reason known to its maker “chiclets.” A waiter at the
Halifax Hotel informed me that an English lady had ordered a pair of
“chiclets”—broiled—for luncheon, under the impression that it was the
poultry _par excellence_ of the country, like Maryland squab or reed
birds.]
I tossed him a coin, but my journey was long, the cars
were crowded, and the dank and dripping lilies would
have been an embarrassment; so I left them in his hands.
But they were very beautiful; and there is no scent in all
the world for me—save the scent of lilac—so pregnant
with charm, so redolent of poetry unwritten.
But the water-lily is not the flower of the Province.
That is the sweet scented, rich-hued trailing arbutus—the
far-famed Mayflower, so rare in other parts of Canada,
here so plentiful that it has become the emblem of New
Scotland, from which is derived the poetic and significant
motto of the Province: “We bloom amid the snows.”
No flower is so popular. One commonly meets with large
parties of young people in the woods, in quest of the Mayflower;
they are worn in corsage and button-hole, or
carried as a bouquet in the hand by shoppers and pedestrians.
The country people, Acadians, Indians, and Negroes,
gather them into little bunches and bring them to market,
or hawk them about the capital. So that, while it is in
season, it is all-pervasive in drawing-room, parlour window,
and office. So jealous are the Nova Scotians of their prior
rights in this flower that a decade since, impelled by the
claims of the Massachusetts folk, who seem somehow to
have confounded the blossom with the name of that truly
Leviathan ship the _Mayflower_, which bore thither the
Pilgrim Fathers, that they passed in legislature “An Act
respecting the Floral Emblem of Nova Scotia. Edward,
Sect. 1, cap. x.,” which duly sets forth their priority for
all future generations.
Speaking of the vessel of the Pilgrim Fathers, a gentleman
at Liverpool, who showed me a piece of her timbers,
a cherished heirloom in the family, said:
“There never was a ship like the _Mayflower_, or an
instance which so shows the untrustworthiness of contemporary
testimony. We know her now to have been one of
the marine wonders of the seventeenth century, far larger
than the _Lusitania_ or the _Mauretania_, or any modern ship.
To find her equal we must go back to Noah’s Ark, unless,
indeed, the _Royal George_, which survives to-day in the
form of at least a million chairs, tables, wardrobes, and
settees, were larger. The mere fact that she carried over
a thousand families, including many of Irish and German
origin, is a proof of her dimensions!”
Westward from Windsor, on the edge of the Basin of
Minas, lies the great marsh meadow—Grand Pré—a district
over which the genius of a poet has thrown a film of
magic, making it, even at noonday, a region of perpetual
twilight. It is strange to think that in Haliburton’s day,
Grand Pré, unheard of as a village, was merely the Grand
Prairie situated in Horton township, and that Evangeline
had never been heard of. Crossing the Avon, one is confronted
with a range of hills called the Horton Mountains.
The view from the roadway on the summit is unmatched
in Nova Scotia. It includes four counties, including the
thousands of acres of marsh meadow reclaimed by the
Acadians. Before one’s eyes stretch the verdant and
populous vales of the Gaspereaux and Cornwallis, with
their wooded groves and tilled fields: the waters of five
rivers may be seen flowing into the basin. Travellers are
fond of comparing it to the valley of the Dee, near Aberdeen,
but that view lacks the wondrous Cape Blomidon, a majestic
promontory 670 feet high, which forms the abrupt eastern
termination of the North Mountain chain.
Where Blomidon’s blue crest looks down upon the valley land.
How many poets have seen and sung of Blomidon and
Grand Pré? But one may see with the eye of the mind
and with the eye of the body, and the best description of
the district is still that of the poet who himself never set
foot in Acadia.
“... Vast meadows stretched to the eastward,
Giving the village its name and pasture to flocks without number;
Dikes that the hands of the farmers had raised with labour incessant,
Shut out the turbulent waves; but at stated seasons the flood-gates
Opened and welcomed the sea, to wander at will o’er the meadows.
West and South there were fields of flax and orchards and corn-fields,
Spreading afar and unfenced o’er the plain; and away to the northward
Blomidon rose, and the forests old, and aloft on the mountains
Sea-fogs pitched their tents, and mists from the mighty Atlantic
Looked on the happy valley, but ne’er from their station descended.”
Do you remember the visitor to Abbotsford, who,
remembering the beautiful lines
“He who would see fair Melrose aright,
Must visit it by the pale moonlight;”
inquired:
“Did you often visit it by moonlight, Sir Walter?”
“Alas, never!” confessed the poet.
Emerson says somewhere that we write by aspiration and
antagonism, as well as from experience, and the one writing
may be as true as the other. Critical persons there may
be, who seize upon passages in “Evangeline” as contrary
to “facts.” Personally, I found few discrepancies between
Longfellow and Baedeker.
Strikingly in evidence is the great increase in the number
of tourists to the land of Evangeline. It is one of the
wonders of literature, certainly without parallel on this
side of the Atlantic, how Longfellow’s hexameters have
fenced in this Acadian valley, and even peopled it with
poetic ghosts. Thither in their thousands come the living
twentieth-century flesh-and-blood to pay their tribute to
the _genius loci_. I came across them lingering by Evangeline’s
Well, and gazing sentimentally upon the spot where
stood the forge of Basil. But they are, almost without
exception, New England, not Old England pilgrims.
On the crest of the highroad stands the white-painted
old chapel of the Scottish Covenanters, the high pulpit
and the old-fashioned pews within, and no barer now than
when the voice of the stern-faced preacher rang out his
exhortations and his remonstrances against the world, the
flesh, and the devil, to the meek self-denying flock in whose
bosoms the influence of the world, the flesh, and the devil,
was fleeting, remote, and exiguous indeed! These Scots
were the successors by one remove, of the banished Acadians,
and to them this land of Grand Pré must have been Canaan,
a land flowing with milk and honey; for owing to its
sheltered situation and the marshes and many silt-conveying
rivers, the soil is very fertile.
Along the road my driver urged his spirited mare.
We turned presently sharp to the left, through a quaint stone
gateway, with an appearance of such antiquity as if it
might be coeval with the Round Tower of Newport, and
through an avenue of apple-trees, which developed into
a thickly planted orchard, so thick that the trees might
almost have been an army, close-ranked for action (_quære_:
a Pomeranian army?), and then winding in and out
beneath the golden fruit, a house bursts on the view, a
house of rambling pattern, many-winged and gabled,
covered with flaming creeper; and in this house I passed
several delightful days. Under that roof I listened to the
pleasing gossip and animated reminiscence of an old judge
who knew New Scotland well from Cape North to Cape
Sable; who had for nigh fifty years travelled on circuit by
good roads and bad, populous and lonely, by night and day,
in summer and winter; who knew the people, especially
the farmers, as Haliburton knew them; and who had many
tales to tell of their customs and their manners, their hopes
and their disappointments, their diversions, schemes, and
oddities. There was in all this flow of talk no narrowness
of vision—no pettiness; but much aspiration towards the
broader, more generous point of view, much humour, much
courtesy. And as I sat at dinner sipping, not cider, not
tea, not “fire-water and bubbles,” but bumpers of champagne
of noble vintage,[6] listening to the hale old judge,
[Footnote 6: I fancy this champagne was some of that carried by a
French ship bound for St. Pierre, which was wrecked off a prohibition
village on the south-east coast. The ship was making a return voyage
loaded chiefly with French wines. As case after case was brought ashore
the inhabitants looked blank. Every sturdy teetotaller suspected his
neighbour, and nobody felt quite easy in his mind until an enterprising
Yankee patent-medicine pedlar had carted away the whole stock, and
Satan, speaking with a strong Rheims and Epernay accent, was placed at
defiance.]
Lowell’s words came to me, and I thought “The soil out
of which such men as he are made is good to be born on,
good to live on, good to die for, and be buried in.” I
thought of that often in New Scotland when I met some
of her sons, and marked their characters and noted their
talk—men of dignity, and ripeness, and gentleness, and
kindliness, such men as my host, the old judge, of the
present Chief Justice of the Province, of Sir Charles Tupper,
still with us, of amiable Sir Malachy, of Judge S., and of
many more. Of many, many more.
“The soil out of which such men as he are made is
good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for, and be
buried in.” O ye in England—at the heart of the Empire—deem
not all the culture, all the innate courtesy and gentleness
of manhood and womanhood is within the confines of
your own little island, reckoning the folk overseas as all
crude, and brusque, and unpolished, because of the examples
that come out of the rough and strenuous West. There are
thousands—Colonial-born, as were their fathers and grandfathers
before them—who do not come back and sit at
the Imperial Mother’s knee, who may not be seen careering
up and down Regent Street, or imbibing strange beverages
at the Hotel Cecil, who are the true sons of the Old Land,
and better represent the qualities which have made her
great than all the loud shouters from Toronto, the hustlers
of Winnipeg, and the boosters of Vancouver. These others
are of the type of men which make Canadian soil good to
be born on—who carry on the tradition of the loyal, self-denying,
idealistic spirit in which British Canada was
founded; and I thank God they are not yet extinct.
[Illustration: ST. EULALIE. THE RESIDENCE AT GRAND PRÉ OF HON. SIR
ROBERT WEATHERBE.]
All this time I am forgetting my hostess, whose sweet
and gracious presence is often in my thoughts, a descendant
of one of the earliest pioneers, herself the daughter of a
judge, who has given six stalwart sons to the Province and
the Empire, one to the army, one to the Civil Service,
two to medicine, another to science, scattered thousands
of miles apart—the true breed of British mother who is,
after all, Britain’s greatest glory.
Readers of Longfellow’s poems will not question the
appropriateness with which this house has been named.
It is “St. Eulalie.” In the very heart of the old Acadian
settlement it stands. A tablet within the porch states:
“Here stood the village of Melançon, where, on the night
of de Villiers memorable arrival in 1747, was celebrated an
Acadian wedding attended by the villagers from Grand Pré.
“After being here warmed by huge fires and regaled with
cakes and cider, the French and Indians marched through
blinding snows under the guidance of returning guests, who
disclosed at Grand Pré the several houses in which the British
slept.
“Afterwards de Villiers, wounded in the attack, caused
himself to be carried back for treatment by the surgeon here
encamped.”
All the walks and drives hereabout are full of the charm
of scenery—of the magic of historic association. On a
hummock by the river I came across a tall tree, upon which
was fixed the following inscription: “Near this spot
Coulon de Villiers with about 20 French officers and 400
Canadians and Indians on the night of 10th Feb. 1747,
from Beauséjour, crossed the river in a snowstorm to attack
Colonel Noble with a force of 500 New Englanders at
Grand Pré.”
The expulsion of the Acadians is perhaps the most
striking and pathetic passage in New Scotland’s history.
The British authorities could not treat all these thousands
of people as rebels, for the great majority of them had not
fought against them at Beauséjour and elsewhere, but had
sulked quietly in their villages. But the long patience of
the Provincial Government was exhausted. Repeatedly
Governor Lawrence urged them to take the oath, repeatedly
and stubbornly they refused.
Then and not till then did the decree of exile go forth.
Ignorant of the trades and callings by which they could
earn a livelihood in those countries, the Acadians could not
be shipped to France or England. Colonists they were,
and the sons of colonists, suited only for a colonial life,
and on banishment they could only be distributed in
batches amongst the English colonies along the Pacific
coast.
Many hearts, even amongst the soldiers, warmly compassioned
the fate of the unhappy Acadians. Those who
had taken the oath were safe in their homesteads. A
number fled into the forest. As for the rest the military
officers were given their instructions, At Beauséjour
400 men were seized, and without warning the people,
Colonel Winslow marched rapidly to Grand Pré. He
summoned the men of the village to meet him in the
chapel, and there read to them the decree of banishment.
In vain they tried to escape; the doors were shut and
guarded by English soldiers. The people of village after
village were seized, until 6000 souls had been gathered
together. For a long time they had to wait for transports
to bear them away. Many had forcibly to be conducted
on board the ships. Old and young men, women, and
children, were marched to the beach. A few members of
the same family became separated from each other, never to
meet again. But the soldiers strove their best to perform
their painful duty as humanely as possible, and no unnecessary
harshness marked their operations.
From Minas, Chignecto, and Annapolis, ship after ship
bore their weeping burdens southward. Many, long years
afterwards, returned again to Acadia, where, when Quebec
and the French flag had fallen, they were no longer a
danger to the Government. Such of the Acadians as
reached Quebec were treated with inhumanity by the French
officials there, and nearly perished of famine. It is said
that they were reduced to four ounces of bread per day,
and sought in the gutters of Quebec to appease their hunger.
Smallpox broke out amongst them, and many entire families
were destroyed. Such, alas! was the fate of those unhappy
beings “whose attachment to their mother country
was only equalled by her indifference.”
The expulsion of the Acadians may seem to us a cruel
act, but it was forced upon the English by the hardest
necessity—the necessity of self-protection,[7] and in spite of
all that has since been written to the contrary, no impartial
student of history can perceive in what other way than
the deportation of these irreconcilables could the peace
of New Scotland have been assured, a peace which has
lasted to this day.
[Footnote 7: I am aware that a hysterical gentleman of the name of
Richard, a descendant of one of the Acadian families, has sought in two
octavo volumes to prove otherwise. I have perused his volumes attacking
Mr. Parkman with a freedom of invective and wealth of epithet that goes
far to damage his case, with no other emotion than that of renewed pity
for the fate of the Acadians and a renewed certainty of its absolute
necessity.]
Of Grand Pré it has been said that it boasts a threefold
attraction—beauty, fertility, and sentiment. Originally
Grand Pré was a long straggling Acadian settlement beginning
at what is now the Grand Pré railway station,
three miles east of Wolfeville, with Horton Landing one
mile away. The salient features of the landscape to-day
is, and the older portions of those dikes are, relics of the
Acadian occupation.
A group of old willows in one part of this great meadow,
undoubtedly planted by the original French inhabitants,
the well supposed to have been part of the village’s water-supply,
and the reputed sites of the forge of Basil the
blacksmith and of the house of Father Felicien, are duly
shown to the visitor. I have already mentioned the place
where a body of New England troops were massacred by
the French and their Indian allies nine years before the
expulsion.
A recent discovery at Grand Pré revealed portions of
the foundations of the Acadian Church of St. Charles. Most
of the stone had been removed, either to be used in other
foundations built by the English settlers after the deportation,
or had been removed to enable the owner to plough
over the church site, but enough has been exposed to
determine the size of the church.
Excavations have brought to light also the remains of
the fireplace and foundations of the chimney built by
the soldiers who were quartered in the church. After the
first removal 600 Acadians had to be kept prisoners till
ships arrived from Boston to take them away. All Minas
was destroyed, save the few houses in Grand Pré needed
to shelter these 600 people. Wherefore the soldiers made
the church comfortable for themselves during the early
winter, till they finally departed.
I had an interesting chat with a descendant of the
original Acadians, one Herbin by name, an intelligent
and enterprising spirit, who has recently set up business
in the Grand Pré district, and seems to prosper at the hands
of the numerous tourists to the shrine of Evangeline.
Each morning I arose and gazed across the Basin of
Minas at Blomidon, as it lay like some sleeping lion. And
the sun shone, and the summer wind rippled the tall marsh
grass as if it were pale green sea. And far beyond the
white sails of ships stole in and out of the Basin, bending
and veering like seagulls. And once out from an orchard
a farmer’s boy sang a selection from “Parsifal” (“Learnt
it off a gramaphone. Learnt a lot o’ operatic songs that
way”); and my heart, too, sang, and I was glad I had
come to Grand Pré.
From Grand Pré I went on to Wolfeville, a pleasant
little town which, for some odd reason, is spelt “Wolfville.”
When the “e,” which allies its history with the name of
the famous young general, was elided, I cannot precisely
state, but the town was Wolfeville on the old maps
and in Haliburton’s account of the Province.[8] Here is
situated the Acadia College, a flourishing Baptist institution,
which has recently enjoyed some of Mr. Rockefeller’s
favour, and which has long been an eminent seat of learning
in this part of the Province. But Wolfeville’s chief asset
is the fact of its being a convenient centre for American
tourists visiting the “Evangeline District.”
[Footnote 8: Amongst the pioneers was a family of Wolfe, or De Wolfe,
of Irish origin, and distantly connected with the general’s family.
Descendants of these still survive.]
Wolfeville’s growth has been steady and uninterrupted
since the old coaching days of three quarters of a century
ago, when a few houses on one street composed the settlement.
From this hamlet it grew into a village, and in 1893
into a town.
The Acadia College and its allied institutions have from
the first been the chief asset of the place. Adding to
its attractiveness as a residential centre, they also bring
annually about 400 young men and women here, and pay
out to teachers about $30,000 a year. And besides the
educational, the natural advantages of Wolfeville are considerable.
It is the commercial centre of a fertile and
prosperous region where orcharding and dairying is
remunerative, and the farming population increasingly
prosperous.
With railway facilities there is excellent water communication
for domestic and foreign trade, and a daily
steamboat service to Kingsport and Parrsboro for nine
months in the year, which makes Wolfeville a promising
distributing centre.
[Illustration: THE SCENE OF THE GRAND PRÉ RAID OF 1754.]
This part of Nova Scotia as well as Cape Breton, struck
me as eminently adapted to sheep-raising. I am told that
where the same care is bestowed upon these animals as is
bestowed in other countries, excellent results are attained
on Nova Scotia farms. There should be a flock of sheep
on, at least, three-quarters of the farms, and the only
obstacle which has hitherto militated against success in the
parts of the Province best fitted by nature for sheep-raising,
has been their destruction by dogs. Until this is rectified
by legislation, and I have the Government’s assurance
that this will be attempted—it is useless for any farmer
to engage in the pursuit. Repeatedly throughout Nova
Scotia I have heard stories of canine depredations. The
worst was a case at Yarmouth, where a young Englishman
had his whole flock of prize sheep destroyed by dogs. When
he made complaint to the owner of a ferocious cur demanding
that the animal be shot, or chained, or muzzled, it’s
owner retorted, “Why should I get rid of my dog? What
business have you to keep sheep?” A rigorously enforced
tethering or muzzling order for sheep-worrying dogs would
meet the difficulty.
Whether Kentville will continue to be the headquarters
of the railway rests with the Canadian Pacific authorities.
Should that corporation see fit to remove the workshops
and offices from the town, it will be a blow not wholly
unexpected.
However, the Canadian Pacific always exploits the
country its line traverses, so what is the gain of the surrounding
district would in time benefit the town.
Kentville ought, I think, not to bestow all its eggs in one
basket. Owing to the partial failure of one recent year’s
apple crop, this town being in the heart of the fruit district
and largely dependent on apples, a good deal less prosperity
was experienced in consequence.
From Kentville I motored through the Cornwallis
Valley, taking in a number of villages, and seeing on all
sides evidences of prosperity, especially in Waterville and
Berwick. Besides material prosperity, and even moral, and
intellectual, and æsthetic, there is another kind of prosperity—that
of years; and a gentleman who came forward to
my car and shook hands with me, vigorously enjoyed this
kind of prosperity. He was a centenarian. He had long
ago undertaken a race with Father Time, and that inexorable
personage had not yet succeeded in running my friend
to Mother Earth. Let us hope his race will not be run
this many a day; for the absurd brevity of our lives is a
great and growing grievance with us all.
[Illustration: A “JOY RIDE” IN “THE VALLEY.”]