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The swamper stood up with his own eyes full, but his voice was firm. "Bonaventure, I don't got much. I got dat li'l' shanty on Bayou des Acadiens, and li'l' plunder inside few kittle', and pan', cast-net, fish-line', two, t'ree gun', and my wife' grave, yond' in graveyard. But I got Claude, my boy, my son. You t'ink God want me give my son to whole worl'?"
There there not seen save by memory's eye, yet there not the less, was Bayou des Acadiens. Ah me! there was Grande Pointe. "O Bonaventure! Do I owe you" Claude's thought was in the old Acadian tongue "Do I owe you malice for this? No, no, no! Better this than less."
Pierre had belted his earnings about him under the woollen sash that always bound his waist, shouldered his rifle, taken one last, silent look at the cabin on Bayou des Acadiens, stood for a few moments with his hand in Bonaventure's above one green mound in the churchyard at Grande Pointe, given it into the schoolmaster's care, and had gone to join his son.
And now Claude heard with joy this question asked in English. To ask it in their old Acadian tongue would have meant retreat; this meant advance. And yet he knew his father yearned for Bayou des Acadiens. Nay, not his father; only one large part of his father's nature; the old, French, home-loving part. What should Claude answer? Grande Pointe? Even for St. Pierre alone that was impossible.
A little farther on they are joined as noiselessly by Blind River, and the united waters slip on northward through the dim, colonnaded, watery-floored, green-roofed, blue-vapored, moss-draped wilderness, till in the adjoining parish of Ascension they curve around to the east and issue into the sunny breadth of Lake Maurepas. Thus they make the Bayou des Acadiens.
Pierre, and that every evening thenceforward when that small kerosene-lamp glimmered in the deep darkness of Bayou des Acadiens, the abecedarian Claude was a teacher. But even before the first rough roll was made he was present, under the little chapel-tower, when for the first time its bell rang for school.
Pierre had returned from the little railway-station where Claude had taken the cars, he had seemed as patiently resigned to the new loneliness of Bayou des Acadiens as his thatched hut, which day by day sat so silent between the edges of the dark forest and the darker stream, looking out beyond the farther bank, and far over the green waste of rushes with its swarms of blackbirds sweeping capriciously now this way and now that, and the phantom cloud-shadows passing slowly across from one far line of cypress wood to another.
Colonel Abijah Willard gave it the name. It was his retreat in exile, and there he died in 1789. Of the thousand Acadiens apportioned to the Province of Massachusetts, the committee appointed by General Court for the duty of distributing them among the several towns, sent three families, consisting of twenty persons, to Lancaster.
"Wasn't it your father," he said, "who was my guide up Bayou des Acadiens and Blind River the time I made the survey in that big swamp north of Grande Pointe? Isn't your name Claude St. Pierre?" And presently they were acquainted. "You know I took a great fancy to your father. And you've been clear through the arithmetic twice?
[Footnote 241: Rameau (La France aux Colonies, I. 63), estimates the total emigration from 1748 to 1755 at 8,600 souls, which number seems much too large. This writer, though vehemently anti-English, gives the following passage from a letter of a high French official: "que les Acadiens émigrés et en grande misère comptaient se retirer
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