Then they were declared prisoners, and the church became the guardhouse. Ten men at a time were allowed to leave the building, to pack their goods and assist in the preparations for departure; and when they returned ten others were also permitted to leave for a time. While Moncton was destroying Remsheg, Shediac, and other towns on the Gulf coast, Handfield gathered up the French Annapolitans, and Murray those about Windsor, putting them on shipboard; and on the 21st of October the ships, with their wretched passengers, set sail. In the confusion and hurry of embarkation some families were separated; and it is on this fact that the story of Evangeline is founded. Most of the exiles were scattered among the towns of Massachusetts; and in the State House in Boston some curious old records relate to them, one town desiring compensation "for keeping three French pagans", from which it seems that there was still prejudice against them because of their religion. "From the cold lakes of the north to sultry southern Savannahs," to the region where "On the banks of the Teche are the towns of St. Maur and St Martin," to the parish of Attakapas "and the prairies of fair Opelousas" in Louisiana, some of the exiles wandered. Their descendants live there at the present time, and are known as Cajeans. Though sometimes harshly treated in the towns where they were quartered, though shouldered off from one village to another when one grew weary of or made excuses for not maintaining them, the poor wanderers were mild, gentle, and uncomplaining. A writer in "Canadian Antiquities" says: "None speaks the tongue of Evangeline; and her story, though true as it is sweet and sorrowful, is heard no more in the scenes of her early days." The way in which it came about that Longfellow wrote his poem was in this wise: one day, when Hawthorne and a friend from Salem were dining with the poet, the Salem gentleman remarked to the host, "I have been trying to persuade Hawthorne to write a story based on a legend of Acadie and still current there,--the legend of a girl who, in the dispersion of the Acadians, was separated from her lover, and passed her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only found him dying in a hospital when both were old." The host, surprised that this romance did not strike the fancy of the novelist, asked if he himself might use it for a poem; and Hawthorne, readily assenting, promised not to attempt the subject in prose until the poet had tried what he could do with it in metrical form. No one rejoiced more heartily in the success of the world-renowned poem than the writer who generously gave up an opportunity to win fame from his working up of the sad theme.