of the most ingenious machinery and the united labor of multitudes he can do little but scratch the surface of the planet, without being able to alter the expression of one of its lineaments. Fire and water are both his masters. His prosperity is at the mercy of the weather. 2. Matter is baffling and ruining him somewhere on the earth at all hours of day and night. He has to struggle continually to maintain his position, and then maintains it with exceeding difficulty. Considering how many thousands o years the race of man has inhabited the world, it is sur. prising how little control he has acquired over diseases, how little he knows of them, how much less he can do to alleviate them. Even in his arts and sciences there are strangely few things which he can reduce to certainty. 3. His knowledge is extremely limited, and is liable to the most humiliating errors and the most unexpected mistakes. He is in comparative ignorance of himself, of his thinking principle, of the processes of his immaterial soul, of the laws of its various faculties, or of the combinations of mind and matter. Metaphysics, which should rank next to religion in the scale of sciences, are a proverb for confusion and obscurity. Infinite longings perpetually checked by a sense of feebleness, and circumscribed within the limits of a narrow prison,—this is a description of the highest and most aspiring moods of man. 4. Such is the condition of our man if we look at him in his solitary dignity as lord of the creation. But even this is too favorable a representation of him. His solitary dignity is a mere imagination. On the contrary, he is completely mixed up with the crowd of inferior creatures, and in numberless ways dependent upon them. If left to himself, the ponderous earth is simply useless to him. Its maternal bosom contains supplies of minerals and gases, which are meant for the daily sustaining of human life. Without them this man would die in torture in a few days; and yet by no chemistry can he get hold of them himself and make them into food. 5. He is simply dependent upon plants. They alone can make the earth nutritious to him, whether directly as food themselves, or indirectly by their support of animal life. And they do this by a multitude of hidden processes, many of which, perhaps the majority, are beyond the explanation of human chemistry. Thus he is at the mercy of the vegetable world. The grass that tops his grave, which fed him in his life, now feeds on him in turn. 6. In like manner is he dependent upon the inferior animals. Some give him strength to work with, some warm materials to clothe himself with, some their flesh to eat or their milk to drink. A vast proportion of mankind have to spend their time, their skill, their wealth, in waiting upon horses and cows and camels, as if they were their servants, building houses for them, supplying them with food, making their beds, washing and tending them as if they were children, and studying their comforts. 7. More than half the men in the world are perhaps engrossed in this occupation at the present moment. Human families would break up, if the domestic animals ceased to be members of them. Then, as to the insect world, it gives us a sort of nervous trepidation to contemplate it. The numbers of insects, and their powers, are so terrific, so absolutely irresistible, that they could sweep every living thing from the earth and devour us all within a week, as if they were the fiery breath of a destroying angel. 8. We can hardly tell what holds the lightning-like speed of their prolific generations in check. Birds of prey, intestine war, man's active hostility,-these, calculated at their highest, scem inadequate to keep down the insect population, whose numbers and powers of annoyance yearly threaten to thrust us off our own planet. It is God Himself who puts an invisible bridle upon these countless and irresistible legions, which otherwise would lick us up like thirsty fire. FABER. THEY 82. THE ACADIANS. were Bretons originally, these Acadians, and from that land, and from illustrious La Vendée, whose warriors went to battle with the sacred Heart of Mary, white embreidered, upon their breasts, they brought their fidelity to the Queen of Angels, far over the troubled Atlantic, to the wild and ice-bound shores of Cape Breton. They made those deserts blossom; the valleys of that boreal and breezeswept land stood thick with golden corn; sixty thousand head of horned cattle soon grazed upon the pastures tilled by their careful and industrious hands. 2. The flax which they cultivated and the flocks which they reared, spun and woven by the nimble fingers of their pious women, clothed the Acadian farmers. Each family was well able to provide for its own wants, so that there were no poor, and little barter. The blessing of paper money had not lighted upon them, and they had little or no use for the slight stock of gold and silver which they possessed. They kept as clear of the court of justice as they did of the trader's exchange. 3. The elders of the villages settled all slight quarrels; they carried the greater to the priest. He drew their public acts, recorded their wills, kept them instructed in the law of God, consecrated their lives by Sacraments, kept vivid in their souls devotion to Mary Immaculate. His salary was the twenty-seventh part of the harvest always more than he needed, for there were no poor. "Misery was wholly un known, and benevolence anticipated the demands of poverty." 4. The Acadian married young, chose his own partner for life, and she brought him her portion in flocks and herds. When the union had been determined on, the whole commu nity built the young couple a house, broke up the lands about it, supplied them with life's necessaries for a twelvemonth, and bade them God-speed. The population numbered eighteen thousand souls. And when their sun was at its serenest the storm came down. 5. In 1762 this charge was brought against them: "that the Council were fully convinced of their strict attachment to the French king, and their readiness at all times to take part with and assist him." This was the cloud, and from it the 1ghtning soon fell. In the Octave of Our Lady's Seven Sorrows, September 17, they stood upon the shore surrounded with bayonets which were to drive them, if resisting, into the vessels prepared for their deportation. Their houses, churches, barns, and mills, had been given to the flames-two hundred and fifty-three of these burning at once in a single settlement, five hundred lying in ashes in another. Some fled and perished in the woods, some made good their escape, most of them submitted to the force employed. 6. Back from the cold beach about a mile stood the Church of Our Lady of Acadie. There they gathered for the last time, while Father Reynal offered the Holy Mysteries for them Then they marched slowly out, weeping, telling their beads chanting the Litanies of the Blessed Virgin, singing hymns to her eternal Son and her. All the way from that chapel to the shore the mourning procession passed through the kneeling ranks of their wild weeping mothers and wives, of their sisters and little children; and when the men had passed, these rose and followed to the ships. And so, driven aboard, they passed away over the strange seas, in that Octave of Our Lady of Sorrows. 7. The sun went down. Such of the poor women as were left found shelter where they could for themselves and their children, and the provincial soldiery stood in their ranks upon the sands, alone in a once beautiful and fertile country, "without a foe to subdue, or a population to protect. But the volumes of smoke," says the Protestant historian, "which the half-expiring embers emitted, while they marked the site of the peasant's cottage, bore testimony to the extent of the work of destruction. For several successive evenings the cattle gathered round the smoking ruins, as if in expectation of the return of their masters, and all night long the faithful watchdogs howled over the scene of desolation, and mourned alike the hand that had fed and the house that had sheltered them." 8. All these sad victims were sown, like wild-flower seeds, by chance as it were, all along the North American coast from Maine to Louisiana. No regard was paid to family ties : daughters were separated from their mothers, wives from husbands, and little children from their families. X. D. MACLEOD. 83. THE TYROLESE. [The Tyrolese from their Alpine heights are represented as returning this proud answer to the insulting demands of unconditional surrender to the French invaders. If their own mountains had spoken, they could not have replied more majestically.] HE land we, from our fathers, had in trust, THE And to our children will transmit, or die; This is our maxim, this our piety, And God and Nature say that it is just: WORDSWORTH. |