efallen them. Man's brotherhood with
man was sufficient to make the New Englanders understand this language.
The strangers wanted food. Some of them sought hospitality at the doors of
the stately mansions, which then stood in the vicinity of Hanover Street
and the North Square. Others were applicants at the humble wooden
tenements, where dwelt the petty shop-keepers and mechanics. Pray Heaven,
that no family in Boston turned one of these poor exiles from their door!
It would be a reproach upon New England--a crime worthy of heavy
retribution--if the aged women and children, or even the strong men, were
allowed to feel the pinch of hunger.

Perhaps some of the Acadians, in their aimless wanderings through the
town, found themselves near a large brick edifice, which was fenced in
from the street by an iron railing, wrought with fantastic figures. They
saw a flight of red freestone steps, ascending to a portal, above which
was a balcony and balustrade. Misery and desolation give men the right of
free passage everywhere. Let us suppose, then, that they mounted the
flight of steps, and passed into the Province House. Making their way into
one of the apartments, they beheld a richly clad gentleman, seated in a
stately chair, with gilding upon the carved work of its back, and a gilded
lion's head at the summit. This was Governor Shirley, meditating upon
matters of war and state, in Grandfather's chair!

If such an incident did happen, Shirley, reflecting what a ruin of
peaceful and humble hopes had been wrought by the cold policy of the
statesman, and the iron hand of the warrior, might have drawn a deep moral
from it. It should have taught him that the poor man's hearth is sacred,
and that armies and nations have no right to violate it. It should have
made him feel, that England's triumph, and increased dominion, could not
compensate to mankind, nor atone to Heaven, for the ashes of a single
Acadian cottage. But it is not thus that statesmen and warriors moralize.

"Grandfather," cried Laurence, with emotion trembling in his voice, "did
iron-hearted War itself ever do so hard and cruel a thing as this before?"

"You have rend in history, Laurence, of whole regions wantonly laid
waste," said Grandfather. "In the removal of the Acadians, the troops were
guilty of no cruelty or outrage, except what was inseparable from the
measure."

Little Alice, whose eyes had, all along, been brimming full of tears, now
burst forth a-sobb