Delay, alas, occurred; commissioners had to be appointed to consider Loyalists' claims, yet in the end England was not ungrateful; land and money were bestowed upon them freely. Albeit there was a long period of suffering and privation, of cold and hunger and hardship. There are few tales which history has to tell so stirring and noble as the exodus of the Loyalists. Most of them had been brought up in comfort, and even luxury; their women were tenderly nurtured and unaccustomed to hardship. But one spirit animated them all, one hope fired all their bosoms, one faith drove them out of the American republic into the wilderness. The exodus was divided into two main streams, one moving eastward to Nova Scotia and the country where a century and a half before Poutraincourt and De la Tour had fought and flourished. The other moved westward to the region north of Lake Ontario, which had witnessed the labours of Frontenac and Lasalle and the sufferings of Brébeuf and his brother Jesuits. These came in by Lake Champlain and ascended the St. Lawrence in open boats, bivouacking at night, resuming their journey by day. They crossed from Oswego on Lake Ontario to Kingston and York, and began at once felling trees and erecting rude cabins. Many had travelled by waggons from North Carolina and Georgia, exposed to insult and danger all the way. Those who followed the eastern {259} course landed at the mouth of the St. John River, New Brunswick, on the 18th May 1783, a day still celebrated in the city of St. John's. They took up settlements in the meadows of the Bay of Fundy and at Port Rasoir in Nova Scotia. There, like the city in the Arabian tale, there sprang up, as if by magic, the town of Shelburne, with 12,000 inhabitants, where yesterday had been but solitude. All eastern Canada, all the country indeed which lay between Detroit and the ocean, became dotted with the settlements of the Loyalists. By them Canada had been little known. They found, to their surprise and their infinite gratitude to God, that instead of the bleak, inhospitable wilderness, they had come into a smiling, sun-kissed, fertile land. Only patience and industry were needed to fell the timber, plough the soil, and reap a harvest. Many difficulties and much self-denial there were to undergo, but the United Empire Loyalists felt amply repaid when they gazed round in years to come at their snug and tidy homesteads, at the little church set by the foot of the green-clad hill, and saw the flag of their ancestors, rudely wrought by loving hands maybe, but oh, how cherished! floating in the crisp, pure air.