Scarcely, however, had they gone a stone’s throw in the great unfenced field, before they snuffed a sulphurous smell from the adjacent lot, the French settlements of Acadia. Queen Anne, the second daughter of James II., who, in 1702 had succeeded her sister Mary, which aforesaid Mary, with her husband, the Orange William, had, as we have already seen, found England too small for them and the aforementioned James, also took a fancy that France was being made too comfortable for her migratory parent, and, in order to keep him travelling, bombarded that country. This little experiment, called in the large-bore histories, Queen Anne’s War, lasted eleven years, and cost England about one sixteenth of her entire value. She obtained, however, as compensation for this outlay, these results in Europe: several fresh monuments in Westminster Abbey, a staggering back-load of debt, a crowd of one-sleeved men, many young women in becoming widow’s caps, Marlborough and wife with salaries amounting yearly to three hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars besides the snug little box at Blenheim Palace, the glorious though empty victories of Ramillies, Malplaquet, Oudenarde, and Blenheim, and that very big elephant, the rock of Gibraltar. Of course our colts became intensely excited by the gunpowdery air, tore away into the northern French lot, and fell to kicking most lustily. The French fillies there naturally bit back and let fly their gallic-shod heels freely; but the New England ponies so worried and wounded them in the flanks and hips as to drive them clean out of the field. Port Royal was reduced and became Ann-apolis; and Acadia, battered by colonial guns to a wreck, and turning up in her distress under the name of Nova Scotia, grasped one of those long humane lines which the Marine Society, or government located at London, threw out at that time continually for distressed communities. To this sea line the blue-nosed, fish-shaped peninsula has since held with the bite of a codfish, trolled and played by the Izaak Walton of nations, until the fish shows signs of letting go the hook. Amid the Alpine glaciers of war, however, there bloomed, as travellers find high up among the ice-fields, the graceful and tender flowers of gentler life.