acquaintance I have of you & my knowledge of your compassionate
spirit, especially towards the soldiers under your command in like
circumstances, urges me to write to you on this occasion (not from
any Distrust I have of your care in these matters, but possibly as
your Distance from the Place where this Company is quartered may
keep you in some Ignorance of the Difficulties these poor men
labour under) to desire you would interpose your best offices for
their Relief. It seems that these men can be of little service in
act of Duty required of them while they are so destitute of the
necessary. Comforts & Refreshments of Life. You will excuse this
Freedom. With my earnest desires of the gracious Presence of God
with you & particularly to prosper your enterprises for the Good of
your nation & Countrey I am, Sir, Your very humble serv't,

"JOSIAH WILLARD."

This was not Captain Willard's first experience of Nova Scotia, nor was
it to be his last. Ten years before he enlisted in the expedition
against Louisburg, being first lieutenant of Captain Joshua Pierce's
company, in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, of which his father,
Samuel Willard, was colonel. He was there promoted to a captaincy, July
31, 1745, three days after his twenty-first birthday. Little more than
twenty years had passed from the time when he had assisted in forcing
the broken-hearted Acadien farmers into exile, and again he sailed for
Nova Scotia, himself a fugitive, proscribed as a Tory, his ample estate
confiscated, and his name a reproach among his life-long neighbors. As
thousands of French Neutrals from Georgia to Massachusetts Bay sighed
away their lives with grieving for their lost Acadie, so we know Abijah
Willard, so long as he lived, looked westward with yearning heart toward
that elm-shaded home so familiar to all Lancastrians. On the coast of