Under the shadow of the protection derived from their acceptance of this oath, the Acadians reposed a few years. It did not oblige them to bear arms against their countrymen, nor did it compromise their religious independence of faith. Again the dykes were built to resist the encroachments of the sea; again village after village arose--at the mouth of the Gasperau, on the shores of the Canard, beside the Strait of Frontenac, at Le Have, and Rossignol, at Port Royal and Pisiquid. During all these years no attempt had been made by the captors of this province, to colonize the places baptized with the waters of Puritan progress. Lunenburgh was settled with King William's Dutchmen; the walls of Louisburgh were rising in one of the harbors of a neighboring island; but in no instance had the filibusters projected a _colony_ on the soil which had been wrested from its rightful owners. The only result of all their bloody visitations upon a non-resisting people, had been to make defenceless Acadia a neutral province. From this time until the close of the drama, in all the wars between the Georges and the Louises, in both hemispheres, the people of Acadia went by the name of "The Neutral French." Meantime the walls of Louisburgh were rising on the island of Cape Breton, which, with Canada, still remained under the sovereign rule of the French. The Acadians were invited to remove within the protection of this formidable fortress, but they preferred remaining intrenched behind their dykes, firmly believing that the only invader they had now to dread was the sea, inasmuch as they had accepted the oath of fidelity, in which, and in their inoffensive pursuits, they imagined themselves secure from farther molestation. Some of their Indian neighbors, however, accepted the invitation of the Cape Breton French, and removed thither. These simple savages, notwithstanding the changes in the government, still regarded the Acadians as friends, and the English as enemies. They could not comprehend the nature of a treaty by which their own lands were ceded to a hostile force; a treaty in which they were neither consulted nor considered.[E] They had their own injuries to remember, which in no wise had been balanced in the compact of the strangers. The rulers in New France (so says the chronicler) "affected to consider the Indians as an independent people." At Canseau, at Cape Sable, at Annapolis, and Passamaquoddy, English forts, fishing stations, and vessels were attacked and destroyed by the savages with all the circumstances that make up the hideous features of barbaric reprisal. Unhappy Acadia came in for her share of condemnation. Although her innocent people had no part in these transactions, yet her missionaries had converted the Abenaqui to faith in the symbol of the crucifixion, and it was currently reported and credited in New England, that they had taught the savages to believe also the English were the people who had crucified our Saviour. To complicate