on. The New England
soldiers on guard gave what help they could, but sullenly; for they were
weary of the misery that they had so long been forced to watch.

The people were huddled on a little patch of marsh within a curve of the
dike. Beyond the dike there spread a stretch of reddish brown
salt-flats, covered with water only at the highest spring-tides, and now
meagrely sprinkled with sharp-edged blades and tufts of the gray
salt-grasses. The flats were soft between the bunches of the grass, and
a broad track was trampled into mire by the passing down of many feet
from the dike's edge to the boats.

In a work like this there are always a thousand unlooked-for delays, and
before half the embarkation was effected the tide had reached the full,
and paused and turned to ebb. As the strip of shining red mud began to
widen between the grasses and the water's edge, the bustle and confusion
increased. Sometimes a woman who had already stepped into the boat,
thinking that her people had preceded her, would spring over the side
into the shallow water, and rush, sobbing with anxious fear, back to the
encampment. Sometimes a child would lose sight of its father or mother
in the press, and lift its shrill voice in a wail of desolation which
found piteous echo in every Acadian heart.

Lower and lower fell the tide. The current was now thick and red with
the mud which it was dragging from the flats to re-deposit on some
crescent shoal at the mouth of the Canard or Piziquid. Over the dike and
down toward the waiting boats came an old man, bent with years,
supported by his son and his son's wife a middle-aged couple. The
decrepit figure in its quaint Acadian garb was one to be remembered. Old
Remi Corveau was a man of means among the Acadian peasants. His feet
were incased in high-top moccasins of vividly embroidered moose-hide,
and his legs in gaiters, or _mitasses_, of dark blue woollen homespun,
laced with strips of red cloth. His coat was a long and heavy garment of
homespun blanket, dyed to a yellowish brown with many decoctions of a
plant which the country-folk now know as "yaller-weed." A cap of coarse
sealskin covered his head, and was tied beneath his chin with a woollen
scarf of dull red. The old man clutched his stick in his mittened right
hand, muttering to himself, and seemed but half aware of what was going
on. When he came to the edge of the wet, red clay, however, he
straightened himself and looked about him. He gaze