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A few planted a New Acadia among their countrymen in Louisiana. Some sought to return to their blackened hearths, coasting in open boats along the shore. These were relentlessly intercepted when possible, and sent back into hopeless exile.
That palace, which had been so inhospitable a residence for the unhappy daughter of Henry IV., the naked walls, the uneven floorings, the ceilings matted with cobwebs, the vast dilapidated chimney-places, the cold hearths on which the charity extended to them by parliament hardly permitted a fire to glow, was completely altered in appearance.
We feel that we are on the spot where the first scene of our history was laid; where the hearths and altars of New England were first placed; where Christianity, and civilization, and letters made their first lodgement, in a vast extent of country, covered with a wilderness, and peopled by roving barbarians. We are here, at the season of the year at which the event took place.
The benches were by the wall, but there were none to sit there; the tables were spread in what had been the hall, but it seemed as if none had gathered round them for many years; the clock struck audibly, there was no voice of mirth or of occupation to drown its sound; time told his awful lesson to silence alone; the hearths were black with fuel long since consumed; the family portraits looked as if they were the only tenants of the mansion; they seemed to say, from their moldering frames, "there are none to gaze on us;" and the echo of the steps of Stanton and his feeble guide, was the only sound audible between the peals of thunder that rolled still awfully, but more distantly, every peal like the exhausted murmurs of a spent heart.
Fires always blazed on the broad stone hearths and the voices of children were heard within the log walls. The hands of women furnished the rooms, and made new clothes of deerskin. The note of life at Fort Refuge was comfort and good cheer. They felt that they could hold the little fortress against any force that might come.
"They may knock 'em off the axles an' make hearths for their fireplaces, and use the axles for posts," suggested Si. "Here, you fellers," said Shorty, "give us a lift. Let's have a house-raisin'. Help us put the roof on."
In the ducal palace there were, in two or three rooms, hearths, and flue-openings for carrying off smoke; but as there was no wood ready for burning, and as there seemed to be no dry wood in sight, the Duke and his son were at the end of their resources as soon as they had gathered together into a safe place food sufficient to last for a week or ten days.
But it was all in vain; the sergeant would not listen to him, for Thomas was a strapping lad; nor would the poor infatuated man himself agree to go back, but cursed like a cadger, and swore that, if he stayed any longer among his plagues, he would commit some rash act; so we were saddled with his family, which was the first taste and preeing of what war is when it comes into our hearths, and among the breadwinners.
Neither did he ever, as men who talk easily at their own hearths are prone to do, speak of projects in the future, even though the projects be no vaster than the planting of a tree or the alteration of a parterre, projects with which rural life so copiously and so innocently teems. The past seemed as if it had left to him no memory, the future as if it stored for him no desire.
Let us swear to fight the Teules and the traitors who abet them, for our cities, our hearths and our altars; till the cities are a smoking ruin, till the hearths are cumbered with their dead, and the altars run red with the blood of their worshippers. So, if we are destined to conquer, our triumph shall be made sure, and if we are doomed to fail, at least there will be a story to be told of us.
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