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Updated: May 22, 2025
Neither party respected the dividing line of the Missaguash, and a petty warfare of aggression and reprisal began, and became chronic. Before the end of the autumn there was an atrocious act of treachery. Among the English officers was Captain Edward Howe, an intelligent and agreeable person, who spoke French fluently, and had been long stationed in the province.
As he sped across the gray-green levels, at this season of the year spongy with rains, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the abbe, with his companions, just quitting the log cabin which served as the quarters of Boishebert. The boy's brow took on a yet darker shadow. When he reached the top of the dike that bordered the Missaguash, he paused an instant and gazed seaward.
Moreover, in the tidal rivers of that region the ebb and flow are so vast and so swift, that the English hoped the tide would be below a dangerous level before the destruction of the dike could be accomplished. In this hope they were right. Ere they had more than half crossed the stretch of marsh the waters of the Missaguash were oozing about their ankles.
On the very edge of the village, halfway up a low hill jutting out into the Missaguash marsh, stood the cabin of Pierre's father amid its orchards. There was little work to do on the farm at this season. The stock had all been tended, and the family were gathered in the kitchen when Pierre, breathless and gasping, burst in with his evil tidings.
Presently the thin procession of teams, winding its gloomy way across the plains of the Missaguash toward Beausejour, became a hurrying throng of astonished and wailing villagers, each one carrying with him on his back or in his rude ox cart the most precious of his movable possessions; while the women, with loud sobbing, dragged along by their hands the frightened and reluctant little ones.
Lord Cornwallis had decided that an English force established in Beaubassin would be the most effective check upon the influence of Beausejour; and the vessels now at anchor off the mouth of the red and winding Missaguash contained a little army of four hundred British troops, under command of Major Lawrence.
Northwest of the settlement lay a wide marsh, through which ran a stream called the Missaguash, some two miles beyond which rose a hill called Beauséjour. On and near this hill were stationed the troops and Canadians sent under Boishébert and La Corne to watch the English frontier.
As they descended the hill they could hear the stream of the Missaguash brawling over the stones of the mid-channel, for the tide was out. Across the solitary marshes could be seen the lights of Fort Lawrence gleaming from their hilltop. Overhead was the weird cry of flocks of wild geese voyaging north.
The Acadian peninsula, now Nova Scotia, had been ceded by France to England. The dividing line between French and English territory was the Missaguash stream, winding through the marshes of the isthmus of Chignecto which connects Acadie with the mainland.
Then, as if terrified with having spoken his true thought, the lad darted away down the slope, and was soon seen speeding at a long trot across the young grass of the marsh to the ford of the Missaguash. At the time when our story opens, events in Acadie were fast ripening to that unhappy issue known as "the expulsion of the Acadians," which furnished Longfellow with the theme of "Evangeline."
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