Authorities differ widely regarding the number of persons expelled from Acadia, many historians giving the estimate at seven thousand. In a letter from Governor Lawrence to the governors of the different colonies to which the exiles were sent, he says: "As their numbers amount to near seven thousand persons, the driving them off with leave to go whither they pleased would have doubtless strengthened Canada with so considerable a number of inhabitants." Bryant says: "Seven thousand probably represented with sufficient accuracy the total French population of Acadia in 1755; but the entire number of the exiled did not exceed, if Minot be correct, two thousand, of whom many subsequently returned to Acadia." Five years after the departure of the exiles a fleet of twenty-two vessels sailed from Connecticut for Grand Pré with a large number of colonists, who took possession of the deserted farms. They found sixty ox carts and yokes, while on the edge of woods of the inland country and in sheltered places heaps of bones told of cattle which had perished of starvation and cold after their owners were forced to leave them to such a fate. A few straggling families of the Acadians were also found, who had escaped from the search of the soldiers, and had lived in hiding in the wilds of the back country for five years, and during that time had not tasted bread. CLARE "Only along the shore of the mournful and misty Atlantic Linger a few Acadian peasants, whose fathers from exile Wandered back to their native land to die in its bosom. In the fisherman's cot the wheel and the loom are still busy, Maidens still wear their Norman caps and their kirtles of homespun, And by the evening fire repeat Evangeline's story." Resolved to see these curious "Clare settlements," extending for fifty miles on the coast, where descendants of the French Acadians live in peace and unity, we reluctantly take our departure at last from dear old Annapolis, which has been our restful haven so long, and where we have been reviving school days in studying history and geography seasoned with poetry and romance. Although it was expected that the W. C. R. R. would be completed from Yarmouth to Annapolis by the latter part of 1876, we are pleased to find that this is not the case, and that we shall have to take steamer, train, and carriage to our destination; anticipating that any place so out of the beaten track must be interesting. The French settlements, a succession of straggling hamlets, were founded by descendants of the exiles, who,-- "a raft as it were from the shipwrecked nation,... Bound by the bonds of a common belief and a common misfortune," drifted back to "L'Acadie" in 1763, the year of the treaty between France and England.