Meanwhile, amid the gloom, by the church Evangeline lingered.

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All was silent within; and in vain at the door and the windows

Stood she, and listened and looked, till, overcome by emotion,

'Gabriel!' cried she aloud with tremulous voice; but no answer

Came from the graves of the dead, nor the gloomier grave of the living. Slowly at length she returned to the tenantless house of her father. Smouldered the fire on the hearth, on the board was the supper untasted, Empty and drear was each room, and haunted with phantoms of terror. Sadly echoed her step on the stair and the floor of her chamber.

In the dead of the night she heard the disconsolate rain fall

Piled in confusion lay the household goods of the peasants.

All day long between the shore and the ships did the boats ply;

All day long the wains came laboring down from the village.

Late in the afternoon, when the sun was near to his setting,

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Echoed far o'er the fields came the roll of
drums from the churchyard.
Thither the women and children thronged.
On a sudden the church-doors
Opened, and forth came the guard, and
marching in gloomy procession
Followed the long-imprisoned, but patient,
Acadian farmers.

Even as pilgrims, who journey afar from
their homes and their country,
Sing as they go, and in singing forget they
are weary and wayworn,

So with songs on their lips the Acadian peasants descended

Down from the church to the shore, amid their wives and their daughters. Foremost the young men came; and, raising together their voices,

Sang with tremulous lips a chant of the Catholic Missions:

'Sacred heart of the Saviour! O inexhaustible fountain!

Fill our hearts this day with strength and submission and patience!'

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Wives were torn from their husbands, and mothers, too late, saw their children Left on the land, extending their arms, with wildest entreaties.

So unto separate ships were Basil and Gabriel carried,

While in despair on the shore Evangeline stood with her father.

Half the task was not done when the sun

went down, and the twilight Deepened and darkened around; and in haste the refluent ocean Fled away from the shore, and left the line of the sand-beach

Covered with waifs of the tide, with kelp and the slippery sea-weed. Farther back in the midst of the household goods and the wagons,

Like to a gypsy camp, or a leaguer after a battle,

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Haggard and hollow and wan, and without

either thought or emotion,

E'en as the face of a clock from which the hands have been taken.

Vainly Evangeline strove with words and caresses to cheer him,

Vainly offered him food; yet he moved not, he looked not, he spake not, But, with a vacant stare, ever gazed at the flickering fire-light.

'Benedicite!' murmured the priest, in tones of compassion.

More he fain would have said, but his heart was full, and his accents

Faltered and paused on his lips, as the feet of a child on a threshold, Hushed by the scene he beholds, and the awful presence of sorrow.

Silently, therefore, he laid his hand on the head of the maiden,

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Raising his tearful eyes to the silent stars that above them

Moved on their way, unperturbed by the

wrongs and sorrows of mortals. Then sat he down at her side, and they wept together in silence.

Suddenly rose from the south a light, as in autumn the blood-red

Slowly the priest uplifted the lifeless head, and the maiden

Knelt at her father's side, and wailed aloud in her terror.

Then in a swoon she sank, and lay with her head on his bosom.

Through the long night she lay in deep, oblivious slumber;

And when she awoke from the trance, she beheld a multitude near her. Faces of friends she beheld, that were mournfully gazing upon her, Pallid, with tearful eyes, and looks of saddest compassion.

Still the blaze of the burning village illumined the landscape,

Reddened the sky overhead, and gleamed on the faces around her,

630 And like the day of doom it seemed to her wavering senses.

Then a familiar voice she heard, as it said to the people,

'Let us bury him here by the sea. When a happier season

Brings us again to our homes from the unknown land of our exile,

Then shall his sacred dust be piously laid in the churchyard.'

Such were the words of the priest. And there in haste by the sea-side, Having the glare of the burning village for funeral torches,

But without bell or book, they buried the farmer of Grand-Pré.

And as the voice of the priest repeated the service of sorrow,

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Lo! with a mournful sound, like the voice of a vast congregation, Solemnly answered the sea, and mingled its roar with the dirges.

'Twas the returning tide, that afar from the waste of the ocean, With the first dawn of the day, came heaving and hurrying landward. Then recommenced once more the stir and noise of embarking;

And with the ebb of the tide the ships sailed out of the harbor,

Leaving behind them the dead on the shore, and the village in ruins.

PART THE SECOND

I

MANY a weary year had passed since the burning of Grand-Pré,

When on the falling tide the freighted vessels departed,

Bearing a nation, with all its household gods, into exile,

Exile without an end, and without an ex

ample in story.

Far asunder, on separate coasts, the Acadians landed;

Scattered were they, like flakes of snow, when the wind from the northeast Strikes aslant through the fogs that darken the Banks of Newfoundland. Friendless, homeless, hopeless, they wandered from city to city,

From the cold lakes of the North to sultry Southern savannas,

From the bleak shores of the sea to the lands where the Father of Waters 10 Seizes the hills in his hands, and drags them

down to the ocean,

Deep in their sands to bury the scattered bones of the mammoth. Friends they sought and homes; and many,

despairing, heart-broken, Asked of the earth but a grave, and no longer a friend nor a fireside. Written their history stands on tablets of stone in the churchyards.

Long among them was seen a maiden who waited and wandered,

Lowly and meek in spirit, and patiently suffering all things.

Fair was she and young: but, alas! before her extended,

Dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with its pathway

Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and suffered before her, 20 Passions long extinguished, and hopes long dead and abandoned,

As the emigrant's way o'er the Western desert is marked by Camp-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in the sunshine.

Something there was in her life incomplete, imperfect, unfinished;

As if a morning of June, with all its music and sunshine,

Suddenly paused in the sky, and, fading, slowly descended

Floated a cumbrous boat, that was rowed by Acadian boatmen.

It was a band of exiles: a raft, as it were, from the shipwrecked

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Nation, scattered along the coast, now floating together,

Bound by the bonds of a common belief and a common misfortune;

Men and women and children, who, guided by hope or by hearsay,

Sought for their kith and their kin among the few-acred farmers

On the Acadian coast, and the prairies of fair Opelousas.

With them Evangeline went, and her guide, the Father Felician. • Onward o'er sunken sands, through a wilderness sombre with forests,

Day after day they glided adown the turbulent river;

Night after night, by their blazing fires, encamped on its borders.

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Now through rushing chutes, among green islands, where plumelike Cotton-trees nodded their shadowy crests, they swept with the current, Then emerged into broad lagoons, where silvery sand-bars

Lay in the stream, and along the wimpling waves of their margin,

Shining with snow-white plumes, large flocks of pelicans waded.

Level the landscape grew, and along the shores of the river,

Shaded by china-trees, in the midst of luxuriant gardens,

Stood the houses of planters, with negrocabins and dove-cots.

They were approaching the region where reigns perpetual summer,

Where through the Golden Coast, and groves of orange and citron, Sweeps with majestic curve the river away to the eastward.

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