Their descendants live there
at the present time, and are known as Cajeans.
Though sometimes harshly
treated in the towns where they were quartered, though shouldered off
from one village to another when one grew weary of or made excuses for
not maintaining them, the poor wanderers were mild, gentle, and
uncomplaining.
A writer in "Canadian Antiquities" says: "None speaks the tongue of
Evangeline; and her story, though true as it is sweet and sorrowful, is
heard no more in the scenes of her early days."
The way in which it came about that Longfellow wrote his poem was in
this wise: one day, when Hawthorne and a friend from Salem were dining
with the poet, the Salem gentleman remarked to the host, "I have been
trying to persuade Hawthorne to write a story based on a legend of
Acadie and still current there, - the legend of a girl who, in the
dispersion of the Acadians, was separated from her lover, and passed
her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only found him dying in a
hospital when both were old." The host, surprised that this romance did
not strike the fancy of the novelist, asked if he himself might use it
for a poem; and Hawthorne, readily assenting, promised not to attempt
the subject in prose until the poet had tried what he could do with it
in metrical form. No one rejoiced more heartily in the success of the
world-renowned poem than the writer who generously gave up an
opportunity to win fame from his working up of the sad theme.
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