conduct toward the English, toward the French.… Those were years of complexity. Little wonder that the sum of their confusion was disaster.
The road followed by the banished to the waiting vessels led over the rise from the church and the willows to the mouth of the Gaspereau. One may yet descend to the shore by the highway which bore forward those driven forms—those sorrow-weighted feet. And on the strand depict in fancy
… The evening fires …
Built of the driftwood thrown on the sands from wrecks in the tempest.
Round them shapes of gloom and sorrowful faces … gathered.
Voices of women … and of men, and the crying of children.
••••••••••
… The stir and noise of embarking;
And with the ebb of the tide the ships…
Leaving behind them the dead on the shore, and the village in ruins.
Two ways lead from the old English village of Grand Pré to Wolfville. One crosses the Great Meadow to "Long Island," diverges to Evangeline Beach, then continues along the banks of the Cornwallis estuary to the classic seat of Acadia University. This drive discloses in its full beauty the tranquil reaches of the prairie, two miles wide and three miles long, which French artisans reclaimed by draining the salt marshes and damming the tidal Gaspereau with a staunch lattice of tree trunks
