In the mean time the French did not spare, at least, the consolation of words and promises to these distrest Refugee-acadians.  They were assured, that they would infallibly be relieved on the regulation of the limits taking place, which was then on the point of being settled, by commissaries, between the two crowns. [The truth is, that in these assurances the French government, which never intended a conclusion, but only an amusement, did not scruple equally deceiving the English, and these infatuated Acadian subjects of ours, who, to the French interest had sacrificed their own, their possessions in their country, their sworn faith, in short, their ALL.  Whoever has the patience to go through the French memorials, in their procedure with our commissaries, may see such instances of their pitiful prevarications, petty-fogging chicanery, quirks, and evasions, as would nauseate one.  The whole stress of their argument, in short, turns merely upon names, where the things themselves were absolutely out of the question, from the manifest notoriety of them.] This hope, in some sort, pacified them; and they lived as well as they could in the expectation of a final decision, which was not so soon to come.

Yet even this example of the sufferings of these people, purely on account of their attachment to the French government, could not out balance with the French Acadians, who remained in the English district, the assiduous applications of our priests to keep them firm in the French interest.  They never ceased giving every mark in their power of their preference of our government to that, under which the treaty of Utrecht had put them.  The English, however, at length finding that, neither by fair nor foul means, could they reclaim or win them over to their purpose, so as that they might in future depend upon them, came at once to a violent resolution.  They surprized and seized every French Acadian-man they could lay their hands on, (the women they knew would follow of course) and, to clear the country effectually of them, dispersed them into the remotest parts of their other settlements in North-America, where they thought they could do the least mischief to them.  Some were shipped off for England:  the priests shared the same fate, and were conveyed to Europe.  With this evacuation, the very existence of the French Acadians may be said to have ended; for in Acadia there are scarce any traces of them left, few or none having escaped this general seizure and transportation, for the necessity of which, the English were perhaps more to be pitied than blamed.

In the mean time our government had so far succeeded, as to force the English, thus to deprive themselves of such a number of subjects, who, but for the reasons above deduced, might have been very valuable ones, and a great strengthening of their new colony.  Hitherto then our neighborhood has made it almost as irksome, and uncomfortable to them, as we could wish; and this fine spot of dominion does not nigh