th a sense of heavy duty done, departed with his New England troops.
Winslow himself had gone some weeks before.

For five years after the great exile the Acadian lands lay deserted, and
the fogs that gathered morning by morning on the dark top of Blomidon
looked down on a waste where came and went no human footstep. All the
while the fated amethyst lay hidden, as far as tradition tells, beneath
the red ooze and changing tides of the creek.

Then settlers began to come in, and the empty fields were taken up by
men of English speech. Once more a village arose on Grand Pre, and
cider-presses creaked on the hills of Gaspereau. Of the Acadians, to
keep their memory green on the meadows they had captured from the sea,
there remained the interminable lines of mighty dike, the old apple
orchards and the wind-breaks of tall poplars, and some gaping cellars
full of ruins wherein the newcomers dug persistently for treasure.

By and by certain of the settlers, who occupied the higher grounds back
of the village, began to talk of a star which they had seen, gleaming
with a strange violet radiance from a patch of unreclaimed salt marsh by
the mouth of the creek. In early evening only could the elfin light be
discerned, and then it was visible to none but those who stood upon the
heights. Soon, from no one knew where, came tales of "The Eye of
Gluskap," and "The Witch's Stone," and "_L'Etoile de Pierrot Desbarat_,"
and the death of the sailor of St. Malo, and the losing of the gem on
the day the ship sailed forth. Of the value of the amethyst the most
fabulous stories went abroad, and for a season the good wives of the
settlers had but a sorry time of it, cleansing their husbands' garments
from a daily defilement of mud.

While the vain search was going on, an old Scotchman, shrewder than his
fellows, was taking out his title-deeds to the whole expanse of
salt-flats, which covered perhaps a score of acres. Having quietly made
his position secure at Halifax, Dugald McIntyre came down on his
fellow-villagers with a firm celerity, and the digging and the defiling
of garments came suddenly to an end by Grand Pre Creek. Soon a line of
new dike encompassed the flats, the spring tides swept no more across
those sharp grasses which had bent beneath the unreturning feet of the
Acadians, and the prudent Scot found himself the richer by twenty acres
of exhaustlessly fertile meadow, worth a hundred dollars an acre any
day. Moreover, he felt t