stranger both to Governor Lawrence & Coll.  Monkton.  But the acquaintance I have of you & my knowledge of your compassionate spirit, especially towards the soldiers under your command in like circumstances, urges me to write to you on this occasion (not from any Distrust I have of your care in these matters, but possibly as your Distance from the Place where this Company is quartered may keep you in some Ignorance of the Difficulties these poor men labour under) to desire you would interpose your best offices for their Relief.  It seems that these men can be of little service in act of Duty required of them while they are so destitute of the necessary.  Comforts & Refreshments of Life.  You will excuse this Freedom.  With my earnest desires of the gracious Presence of God with you & particularly to prosper your enterprises for the Good of your nation & Countrey I am, Sir, Your very humble serv’t,

     “JOSIAH WILLARD.”

This was not Captain Willard’s first experience of Nova Scotia, nor was it to be his last.  Ten years before he enlisted in the expedition against Louisburg, being first lieutenant of Captain Joshua Pierce’s company, in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, of which his father, Samuel Willard, was colonel.  He was there promoted to a captaincy, July 31, 1745, three days after his twenty-first birthday.  Little more than twenty years had passed from the time when he had assisted in forcing the broken-hearted Acadien farmers into exile, and again he sailed for Nova Scotia, himself a fugitive, proscribed as a Tory, his ample estate confiscated, and his name a reproach among his life-long neighbors.  As thousands of French Neutrals from Georgia to Massachusetts Bay sighed away their lives with grieving for their lost Acadie, so we know Abijah Willard, so long as he lived, looked westward with yearning heart toward that elm-shaded home so familiar to all Lancastrians.  On the coast of the Bay of Fundy, not far west of St. John, is a locality yet called Lancaster.  Colonel Abijah Willard gave it the name.  It was his retreat in exile, and there he died in 1789.

Of the thousand Acadiens apportioned to the Province of Massachusetts, the committee appointed by General Court for the duty of distributing them among the several towns, sent three families, consisting of twenty persons, to Lancaster.  These were Benoni Melanson, his wife Mary, and children, Mary, Joseph, Simeon, John, Bezaleel, “Carre,” and another daughter not named; Geoffroy Benway, Abigail, his wife, and children, John, Peter, Joseph, and Mary; Theal Forre, his wife Abigail, and children, Mary, Abigail, Margaret.  The Forre family were soon transferred to Harvard.  They arrived in February, 1756, and the accounts of the town’s selectmen for their support were regularly rendered until February, 1761.  They were destitute, sickly, and apparently utterly unable to support themselves, and were billeted now here, now there, among the farmers, at a fixed price of two shillings and eight-pence each per week for their board.  Sometimes a house was hired for them, and, in addition to rent paid, we find in the selectmen’s charges such items as these:—­