"The embarkation of the inhabitants goes on but slowly," wrote Monckton, from Fort Cumberland, near which he had burned three hamlets; "the most part of the wives of the men we have prisoners are gone off with their children, in hopes I would not send off their husbands without them." Their hope was vain. Near Annapolis a hundred heads of families fled to the woods, and a party was detached on the hunt to bring them in. "Our soldiers hate them," wrote an officer on this occasion; "and, if they can but find a pretext to kill them, they will." Did a prisoner seek to escape, he was shot down by the sentinel. Yet some fled to Quebec; more than three thousand had withdrawn to Miramachi and the region south of the Restigouche; some found rest on the banks of the St. John's and its branches; some found a lair in their native forests; some were charitably sheltered from the English in the wigwams of the savages. But seven thousand of these banished people were driven on board ships, and scattered among the British colonies, from New Hampshire to Georgia--one thousand and twenty to South Carolina alone. They were cast ashore without resources, hating the poorhouse as a shelter for their offspring, and abhorring the thought of selling themselves as laborers. Households, too, were separated; the colonial newspapers contained advertisements of members of families seeking their companions, of sons anxious to reach and relieve their parents, of mothers moaning for their children. The wanderers sighed for their native country; but, to prevent their return, their villages, from Annapolis to the isthmus, were laid waste. Their old homes were but ruins. In the district of Minas, for instance, two hundred and fifty of their houses, and more than as many barns, were consumed. The live stock which belonged to them, consisting of great numbers of horned cattle, hogs, sheep, and horses, were seized as spoils and disposed of by the English officials. A beautiful and fertile tract of country was reduced to a solitude. There was none left round the ashes of the cottages of the Acadians but the faithful watch-dog, vainly seeking the hands that fed him. Thickets of forest-trees choked their orchards; the ocean broke over their neglected dikes, and desolated their meadows.