The Acadians 
Once again we see the crowd assembled on 
the shore. The men are shut in the church ; 
the women carry the household goods to the 
ships. It is not the assembly we saw a while 
ago, however, in poetry and imagination, but a 
crowd of poor hunted peasants, the victims of 
their own ignorance and the playthings of greed 
and cruelty. Their own people have betrayed 
them, and the foreign nation which has so long 
tolerated them on the lands they themselves 
have snatched from the sea and cultivated now 
casts them forth. 
The flames leap up from the miserable 
thatched hovels they call their homes, and the 
cry of despair breaks forth, for, poor though 
they are, those hovels are their homes ; they 
love them and they love the fields they have 
tilled. They are cast miserably forth, outcasts 
indeed, and no matter how poor in intellect or 
in spirit they may have been, their cry resounds 
through time. It is their great sorrow, their 
tragic fate, which appeals to every heart and 
makes the expulsion of the Acadians as it really 
occurred but a shade less pathetic than the 
tragedy the poet recited. 
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