"He wasn't absolutely heartless, and he gave careful directions for provisioning the transports for their long journey." "I am sorry that it was a New Englander who had to carry out these cruel orders," said Priscilla. "Yes, it fell on Lieutenant-Colonel Winslow, and a detachment of those New England troops that had fought at Beauséjour to attend to the deportation at Grand Pré. It was Tuesday, the second of September, when he ordered all the male inhabitants from ten years upwards to assemble on the following Friday in the church at Grand Pré, to hear what his Majesty had to say to them. Then--but really I think one gets the story better from Longfellow. It is from this point that we have our sympathies so deeply touched, and we are willing to forget that the simple-minded Acadians had brought much of their trouble on themselves." "It doesn't make their sufferings less, even if they were to blame," interposed Martine. "That is true. They may have been less peaceable and amiable than they have been represented by the poet, and their homes and their ways of living may have been less--less--" "Æsthetic," suggested Priscilla, with a smile. "Well, æsthetic, then. But all this does not alter the fact that they deserved the greatest pity. Many of them, indeed, honestly believed that they were still the subjects of Louis XV, and that to take the oath required by the English would be a great crime." "What they needed was a really good and disinterested man to advise them; some one like Paul Mascarene, who was partly French, and yet could get the English point of view," said Priscilla. "Some way I can't feel that the English were altogether disinterested--although," she concluded hastily, "I am more on the English side than the French,--and I am very sorry that it was a man of Plymouth descent who carried away the Acadians from Grand Pré." This, in view of Priscilla's previous prejudice against the Acadians, was really a very liberal statement, as the others realized. "It should console you, then, to remember that Colonel Winslow was simply a soldier acting under orders, and we have no reason to think that he used needless cruelty. 'It hurts me to hear their weeping and wailing,' he said in his journal, and this shows that he had a tender heart." "But I can't see why families were separated, and why all these Acadians couldn't have been sent up to Upper Canada to the other French;" and Martine sighed deeply. "You forget that France and England were still at war, and to have put so many able-bodied men at the service of France would indeed have been madness. Governor Lawrence explained all this in letters to the governors of the different colonies to whom he sent the Acadians. They were sent to as many different colonies as possible, and broken up into small groups, so that they could not unite in any plan for return."