In the following summer it was
executed by Captain John Byron, R. N., the poet's
grandfather. Sailors, sappers, and miners worked for
months together, laying the pride of Louisbourg level
with the dust. That they carried out their orders with
grim determination any one can see to-day by visiting
the grave in which they buried so many French ambitions.
All the rest of Ile Royale lost its French life in the
same supreme catastrophe--the little forts and
trading-posts, the fishing-villages and hamlets; even
the farms along the Mira, which once were thought so like
the promise of a second French Acadia.
Nothing remains of that dead past, anywhere inland, except
a few gnarled, weather-beaten stumps of carefully
transplanted plum and apple trees, with, here and there,
a straggling little patch of pale, forlorn narcissus,
now soothing the alien air in vain, round shapeless ruins,
as absolute and lone as those of Louisbourg itself.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
There is no complete naval and military history of
Louisbourg, in either French or English.
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