to the woods of New Brunswick, and one shipload overpowered its officers and fled to St. John River; but in all, six thousand six hundred people were deported. It is the blackest crime that ever took place under the British flag, and the expulsion was only the beginning of the sufferers' woes. Some people found their way to Quebec, but Quebec was destitute and in the throes of war. The wanderers came to actual starvation. The others wandered homeless in Boston, in New York, in Philadelphia, in Louisiana. After the peace of 1763 some eight hundred gathered together in Boston and began the long march overland through the forests of Maine and New Brunswick, to return to Acadia. Singing hymns, dragging their baggage on sleighs, pausing to hunt by the way, these sad pilgrims toiled more than one thousand miles through forest and swamp, and at the end of two years found themselves back in Acadia. But they were like ghosts of the dead revisiting scenes of childhood! Their lands were occupied by new owners. Of their herds naught remained but the bleaching bone heaps where the lowing cattle had huddled in winter storms. New faces filled their old houses. Strange children rambled beneath the little dormer windows of the Acadian cottages, and the voices of the boys at play in the apple orchards shouted in an alien tongue. The very names of the places had vanished. Beauséjour was now Cumberland. Beaubassin had become Amherst. Cobequid was now Truro. Grand Pré was now known as Horton. The heart-broken people hurried on like ghosts to the unoccupied lands of St. Mary's Bay,--St. Mary's Bay, where long ago Priest Aubry had been lost. Here they settled, to hew out for themselves a second home in the wilderness. {237} It will be recalled that Braddock's plans had been captured by the French, and those plans told Baron Dieskau, who had come out to command the French troops, that the English under William Johnson, a great leader of the Iroquois, inured to bush life like an Indian, were to attack the French fort at Crown Point on Lake Champlain. Now observe: on the Ohio, Braddock the regular had been defeated; in Acadia, Lawrence and Monckton and Murray, the English generals, had brought infamy across England's renown by their failure to understand colonial conditions. At Lake Champlain the conditions are reversed. Johnson, the English leader, is, from long residence in America, almost a colonial. Dieskau, the commander of the French, is a veteran of Saxon wars, but knows nothing of bushfighting. What happens? [Illustration: MAP OF ACADIA AND THE ADJACENT ISLANDS, 1755]