or there is
little official record of it; but it can be likened only to the
expulsion of the Acadians multiplied a hundredfold. To the Maritime
Provinces alone came more than thirty thousand people. To the eastern
townships of Quebec, to the regions of Kingston and Niagara and Toronto
in Ontario came some twenty thousand more. It needs no {313} trick of
fancy to call up the scene, and one marvels that neither poet nor
novelist has yet made use of it. Here were fine old Royalist officers
of New York reduced from opulence to penury, from wealth to such
absolute destitution they had neither clothing nor food, nor money to
pay ship's passage away, now crowded with their families, and such
wrecks of household goods as had escaped raid and fire, on some cheap
government transport or fishing schooner bound from New York Harbor to
Halifax or Fundy Bay. Of the thirteen thousand people bound for
Halifax there can scarcely be a family that has not lost brothers or
sons in the war. Family plate, old laces, heirlooms, even the father's
sword in some cases, have long ago been pawned for food. If one finds,
as one does find all through Nova Scotia, fine old mahogany and walnut
furniture brought across by the Loyalists, it is only because walnut
and mahogany were not valued at the time of the Revolution as they are
to-day. And instead of welcome at Halifax, the refugees met with
absolute consternation! What is a town of five thousand people to do
with so many hungry visitants? They are quartered about in churches,
in barracks, in halls knocked up, till they can be sent to farms. And
these are not common immigrants coming fresh from toil in the fields of
Europe; they are gently nurtured men and women, representing the
aristocracy and wealth and conservatism of New York. This explains why
one finds among the prominent families of Nova Scotia the same names as
among the most prominent families of Massachusetts and New York. To
the officers and heads of families the English government granted from
two thousand to five thousand acres each, and to sons and daughters of
Loyalists two hundred acres each, besides 3,000,000 pounds in cash, as
necessity for it arose.

On the north side of Fundy Bay hardships were even greater, for the
Loyalists landed from their ships on the homeless shores of the
wildwood wilderness. Rude log cabins of thatch roof and plaster walls
were knocked up, and there began round the log cabin that tiny clea