Down North and Up Along 
allegiance to King George. At once there was 
trouble, for the Acadians, although they had 
been transferred to English jurisdiction by the 
great treaty of Utrecht, had not thereby been 
changed from Frenchmen into Englishmen ; 
that was something the treaty was not able to 
accomplish, and they declined to take the oath 
of allegiance to England. 
The French had built a strong fort at Louis- 
burg, on the eastern coast of Cape Breton, and 
were not at all unwilling that the Acadians 
should rebel against English authority — quite 
the contrary. Having given up Acadia, there 
was nothing, we may well suppose, they so much 
wanted as to get it back again, and that the 
Acadians should help them to do this. 
We have seen the Acadians in the trans- 
forming light of poetry, and they were a very 
agreeable people ; now we must look upon them 
in the prosaic light of history, which does not 
soften the angles or enrich the colours ; if any- 
thing, it intensifies the external hardness of 
appearances. 
Parkman, in the first volume of his " Mont- 
calm and Wolfe," gives us this picture of 
them ; — 
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