By far the smaller portion of my life had been spent in the Acadian village—only my early boyhood, before the years of schooling at Quebec; and afterwards the fleeting sweetness of some too brief visits, that lay in my memory like pools of enchanted leisure in a desert of emulous contentions. My father, tenderest and bravest of all men that I have known, rested in an unmarked grave beside the northern wash of the Peribonca. My uncle, Jean de Mer, Sieur de Briart, was on the Ohio, fighting the endless battle of France in the western wildernesses. His one son, my one cousin, the taciturn but true-hearted Marc, was with his father, spending himself in the same quarrel. I thought with a longing tenderness of these two—the father full of high faith in the triumph of New France, the son fighting obstinately in what he held a lost cause, caring mainly that his father still had faith in it. I wished mightily that their brave hands could clasp mine in welcome back to Grand Pré. I thought of their two fair New England wives, left behind at Quebec to shame by their gay innocence the corruption of Bigot’s court. Kindred I had none in Grand Pré, unless one green grave in the churchyard could be called my kin—the grave wherein my mother’s girlish form and laughing eyes had been laid to sleep while I was yet a child. Yes, I had no kinsfolk to greet me back to Grand Pré; no roof of mine that I should call it home. But friends, loyal friends, would welcome me, I knew. There was Father Fafard, the firm and gentle old priest, to whom, of course, I should go just as if I were of his flesh and blood. Then there were the De Lamouries— Yes, to be sure, the De Lamouries. And here I took myself by the chin and laughed. I know that, for all my verses, I am in the main a soldier, yet I am so far a poet as to suffer myself to befool myself at times, and get a passing satisfaction out of it. But I always face the fact before I express it in act. I acknowledged to myself that I had been thinking of the De Lamouries’ pleasant farmhouse, and of somewhat that it contained, when I sang “Home again to Acadie the Fair.” I remembered with a pleasant warmth the tall, bent figure, fierce eyes, and courtly air of Giles de Lamourie, the broken gentleman, who through much misfortune and some fault had fallen from a high place at Versailles and been fain to hide himself on an Acadian farm. I thought also of Madame, his wife, a wizened little woman with nothing left, said the villagers, to remind one of the loveliness which had once dazzled Louis himself. To me she seemed an amazingly interesting woman, whose former beauty could still be guessed from its ruins. Both of these good people I remembered with a depth of concern far beyond the deserts of such casual friendlinesses as they had shown me. As I looked down toward their spacious apple-orchard, on the furthest outskirts of the village, it was borne in upon me that they had one claim to distinction beyond all others.