be found prominent in that story.

Of the condition of the women in the Acadian colony but little is known.
It was probably, as a rule, that which was common to the French
peasantry of the time; but there was in the settlement a lack of women,
as we know from the account of Marc Lescarbot in 1507, wherein he tells
us that it was owing to the want of good housewives that the cows which
had been imported at so many pains died soon after their arrival; and
much of his treatise is given up to bewailing the absence from the
colony of women in sufficient numbers to make it pleasant and thriving.
Yet among these colonists, who were rudely driven from their homes by
the strong hand of England, there were women, as we know from the
poetical story of Evangeline, too familiar in Longfellow's poem to be
narrated here, as well as from the later story of the Lady de la Tour, a
Huguenot girl who had married Charles la Tour, the seigneur of Port
Royal. It was a time of conspiracy and internecine strife among the
people of Acadia, and though conspiracy and strife were petty enough in
cause and action and result, they were none the less important to the
actors in them. There arose on the part of Charles de Menou, Seigneur
d'Aulnay de Charnisay, a plot to deprive La Tour of his seigniory, which
Charnisay, whose lands adjoined those of his rival, claimed as his own.
The French court and the governor's house at Boston, then tenanted by
the stern John Endicott, were made in turn arenas of dispute, but we are
concerned more with the appeal to force which came at last. Charles La
Tour had gone to Boston to seek aid against his rival, leaving his fort
in the hands of his wife, who had already been of sterling service in
baffling the intrigues of Charnisay, when his opponent, hearing that the
chatelaine was alone in command of the fort and had but fifty retainers
and little ammunition, determined to take by force that which he
coveted. So he sailed into the Bay of Saint John, where stood Fort La
Tour, and summoned the garrison to surrender. But the Lady de la Tour
was as dauntless in courage as she was faithful in heart to the fortunes
of her husband, and she answered with cannon balls. Charnisay replied in
kind, but the lady had the better of the argument, though conducted on
principles not congenial to her sex, and she forced her foe to retire in
discomfiture, notwithstanding his superiority in men and arms. She
herself directed and inspired t