Newfoundland, The Uttermost, Was Theirs, And One Large Section
Of Its Coast Is Still Known As The 'French Shore;'
Cape Breton was
theirs till the final fall of Louisburgh; Prince Edward Island was
their Island of St. Jean; Charlottetown
Was their Port Joli; and
Frederickton, the present capital of New Brunswick, their St. Anne's;
in the heart of Nova Scotia was that fair Acadian land, where the roll
of Longfellow's noble hexameters may be heard in every wave that breaks
upon the base of Cape Blomedon. In the northern counties of New
Brunswick, from the Mirimichi to the Metapediac, they had their forts
and farms, their churches and their festivals, before the English
speech had ever once been heard between those rivers. Nor is that
tenacious Norman and Breton race extinct in their old haunts and homes.
I have heard one of the members for Cape Breton speak in high terms of
that portion of his constituency; and I believe I am correct in saying
that Mr. Le Visconte, the late Finance Minister of Nova Scotia, was, in
the literal sense of the term, an Acadian. Mr. Cozzans, of New York,
who wrote a very readable little book the other day about Nova Scotia,
describes the French residents near the basin of Minas, and he says,
especially of the women, 'they might have stepped out of Normandy a
hundred years ago!' In New Brunswick there is more than one county,
especially in the North, where business, and law, and politics, require
a knowledge of both French and English.
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