J. F. H.
Away up the Bay, past Sleeping Water and Church Point, past historic Piau's Isle and Belliveau's Cove and the lovely Sissiboo River, past Weymouth and the Barrens, and other villages stretched out along this highroad, between Yarmouth and Digby, is Bleury,—beautiful Bleury, which is the final outpost in the long-extended line of Acadien villages. Beyond this, the Bay—what there is of it, for it soon ends this side of Digby—is English.
But beautiful Bleury, which rejoices in a high bluff, a richly wooded shore, swelling hills, and an altogether firmer, bolder outlook than flat Sleeping Water, is not wholly French. Some of its inhabitants are English. Here the English tide meets the French tide, and, swelling up the Bay and back in the woods, they overrun the land, and form curious contrasts and results, unknown and unfelt in the purely Acadien districts nearer the sea.
In Bleury there is one schoolhouse common to both races, and on a certain afternoon, three weeks after little Narcisse's adventurous voyage in search of the Englishman, the children were tumultuously pouring out from it. Instinctively they formed themselves into four distinct groups. The groups at last resolved themselves into four processions, two going up the road, two down. The French children took one side of the road, the English the other, and each procession kept severely to its own place.
Heading the rows of English children who went up the Bay was a red-haired girl of some twelve summers, whose fiery head gleamed like a torch, held at the head of the procession. As far as the coloring of her skin was concerned, and the exquisite shading of her velvety brown eyes, and the shape of her slightly upturned nose, she might have been English. But her eager gestures, her vivacity, her swiftness and lightness of manner, marked her as a stranger and an alien among the English children by whom she was surrounded.
This was Bidiane LeNoir, Agapit's little renegade, and just now she was highly indignant over a matter of offended pride. A French girl had taken a place above her in a class, and also, secure in the fortress of the schoolroom, had made a detestable face at her.
"I hate them,—those Frenchies," she cried, casting a glance of defiance at the Acadien children meekly filing along beyond her. "I sha'n't walk beside 'em. Go on, you ——," and she added an offensive epithet.
The dark-faced, shy Acadiens trotted soberly on, swinging their books and lunch-baskets in their hands. They would not go out of their way to seek a quarrel.
"Run," said Bidiane, imperiously.
The little Acadiens would not run, they preferred to walk, and Bidiane furiously called to her adherents, "Let's sing mass."