And built the nest anew."

Against such people, the expedition of Col. Church, fresh from the
slaughter of Pequod wars, bent its merciless energies. Regardless of the
facts that the people were non-resistants; that the expeditions of the
French had been only feeble retaliations of great injuries; and always by
levies from the mother country, and not from the colonists; that Villabon,
at the capture of Pemaquid, had generously saved the lives of the soldiers
in the garrison from the fury of the Mic-Macs, who had just grounds of
retribution for the massacres which had marked the former inroads of
these ruthless invaders; the wrath of the Pilgrim Fathers fell upon the
unfortunate Acadians as though they had been a nation of Sepoys.[D]

[D] One incident will suffice to show the character of these forays. A
small island on Passamaquoddy Bay was invaded by the forces under Col.
Church, at night. The inhabitants made no resistance. All gave up;
"but," says Church in his dispatch to the governor, "looking over a
little run, I saw something look black just by me: stopped and heard a
talking; stepped over and saw a little hut, or wigwam, with a crowd of
people round about it, which was contrary to my former directions. I
asked them what they were doing? They replied, 'there were some of the
enemy in a house, and would not come out.' I asked what house? They
said, 'a bark house' I hastily bid them pull it down, _and knock them on
the head, never asking whether they were French or Indians, they being
all enemies alike to me_." Such was the merciless character of these
early expeditions to peaceful Acadia.

"Herod of Galilee's babe-butchering deed
Lives not on history's blushing page alone;
Our skies, it seems, have seen like victims bleed,
And our own Ramahs echoed groan for groan;
The fiends of France, whose cruelties decreed
Those dexterous drownings in the Loire and Rhone,
Were, at their worst, but copyists, second-hand,
Of our shrined, sainted sires, the Plymouth Pilgrim band."

One of the severest cruelties practised upon these inoffensive people, was
that of requiring them to betray their friends, the Indians, under the
heaviest penalties. In Acadia, the red and the white man were as brothers;
no treachery, no broken faith, no over-reaching policy had severed the
slightest fibre of good fellowship on either side. But the Abenaqui race
was a warlike people. At the first invasion,