This was in the early part of July. By the end of the month Lawrence had arranged that Colonel Winslow should embark his New Englanders from a port near Fort Beauséjour and assume control of the movement to forever rid the Minas dyke-lands of the unwelcome Acadians. At this time there were about five thousand descendants of the original settlers of Nova Scotia on the banks of the numerous rivers which flowed through flat and abundant valleys to the Basin. In August the marshlands, reclaimed after the methods of their ancestors, companions of Razilly, Charnisay and Denys, who in their own Brittany had known how to thwart the invading sea, were yellow with ripening grain. The orchards of Normandy apple-trees were weighted with fruit. In the door-ways of the cottages that filed over the hill toward the church, closed now for want of a priest, sat the women of Grand Pré in kirtle and bonnet, busy with distaff and needle. On their breasts were folded white kerchiefs; their ornaments were silver crosses and hearts. The men, vigorous, uneducated peasants, strongly religious but undemonstrative,[1] were in the fields mending the dykes or cutting hay, or in some near-by woodland loading ox-wains with fuel for the hearth. Their deputies, about fifty in number, were kept in duress on an island in Halifax harbour. Rumours of some new
- ↑ It is said that Acadian children rarely kissed their mothers after the first communion, it being a Brittany custom to restrain emotion.
