musements, and
insensible to the charms of the drama, and the splendors of the mimic
spectacle, with its hollow shows of buckram, tinsel, and pasteboard, seems
to have been peculiarly fitted to enjoy these more substantial
enterprises, which, owing to the defenceless condition of the French
province, must have appeared to the rigid Dudleys and Endicotts merely as
a series of light and elegant pastimes.

Scarcely had Sir William Phipps returned to Boston, when the Chevalier
Villabon came from France with troops and implements of war. On his
arrival, he found the British flag flying at Port Royal, unsupported by
an English garrison. It was immediately lowered from the flag-staff, the
white flag of Louis substituted, and once more Acadia was under the
dominion of her parental government.

Villabon, in a series of petty skirmishes, soon recovered the rest of the
territory, which was only occupied at a few points by feeble New England
garrisons, and, in conjunction with a force of Abenaqui Indians, laid
siege to the fort at Pemaquid, on the Penobscot, and captured it. In this
affair, as we have seen, the famous Baron Castine was engaged.

The capture of the fort at Pemaquid, led to a train of reprisals,
conspicuous in which was an actor in the theatre of events who heretofore
had not appeared upon the Acadian stage. This was Col. Church, a
celebrated bushwhacker and Indian-fighter, of memorable account in the
King Philip war.

In order to estimate truly the condition of the respective parties, we
must remember the severe iron and gunpowder nature of the Puritan of New
England, his prejudices, his dyspepsia; his high-peaked hat and ruff; his
troublesome conscience and catarrh; his natural antipathies to Papists and
Indians, from having been scalped by one, and roasted by both; his
English insolence; and his religious bias, at once tyrannic and
territorial.

Then, on the other, we must call to view the simple Acadian peasant,
Papist or Protestant, just as it happened; ignorant of the great events of
the world; a mere offshoot of rural Normandy; without a thought of other
possessions than those he might reclaim from the sea by his dykes;
credulous, pure-minded, patient of injuries; that like the swallow in the
spring, thrice built the nest, and when again it was destroyed,

----"found the ruin wrought,
But, not cast down, forth from the place it flew,
And with its mate fresh earth and grasses brought,