“Across the meadows were wafted”
on the Sabbath morning when Evangeline went on her way to the hospital, and there found her lover dying unknown. The quaint little church—not larger than a country school-house—built of red and black bricks brought from Sweden, is now almost lost in a corner near the river’s edge, in the midst of huge warehouses and intersecting railroad tracks. In the wall near the minister’s desk is a tablet in memory of the first pastor and his wife buried beneath. Fastened to the gallery of the choir—not much higher than one’s head—is the old Swedish Bible first used in the church, and over it two gilded wooden cherubs—also brought from Sweden—that make one smile at their comical features. In the churchyard, under the blue and faded gray tombstones, repose the men and women of the congregation of 1755 and years before. But no vestiges of the Acadian wanderers remain in the Catholic burying-ground.
“Side by side in their nameless graves the lovers are sleeping.
Under the humble walls of the little Catholic churchyard,
In the heart of the city, they lie unknown and unnoticed.”
Many of the Acadians succeeded in wandering back to their country. Others escaped into what is now called New Brunswick, which was then a part of Acadia, and either returned to Nova Scotia in after-years when the whole of Canada was finally ceded to the English, or founded settlements, existing to this day in New Brunswick, and returning their own members to the Provincial Parliaments. The descendants of the Acadians, still speaking the French language and retaining the manners of their forefathers, are more numerous than is generally supposed in Nova Scotia. They number thirty-two thousand out of a total population of three hundred and eighty-seven thousand (387,000), according to the census of 1871. The poet says:
“Only along the shore of the mournful and misty Atlantic
Linger a few Acadian peasants.…
Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of homespun,
And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline’s story.”