This loss of the records has been ascribed to their frequent removals
during periods of trouble, and to the havoc made in the rage of
parties. The Province, like the great world from which it was so far
remote, was distracted with what are sometimes called religious
quarrels, but what I prefer to describe as exceedingly irreligious
quarrels, carried on by men professing to be Christians, and
generated in the heat of disputes concerning the word of the great
Teacher of "peace on earth." Out of these grew any quantity of
rebellion and war, tinctured with their usual flavor of persecution.
For at this era the wars of Christendom were chiefly waged in support
of dogmas and creeds, and took a savage hue from the fury of
religious bigotry. The wars of Europe since that period have arisen
upon commercial and political questions, and religion has been freed
from the dishonor of promoting these bloody strifes so incompatible
with its high office. In these quarrels of the fathers of Maryland,
the archives of government were seized more than once, and, perhaps,
destroyed. On one occasion they were burnt. And so, amongst all these
disorders, it has fallen out that the full development of the State
history has been rendered impossible.

Mr. Ridgely's foray, however, into this domain of dust and darkness
has happily rescued much useful matter to aid the future chronicler
in supplying the deficiency of past attempts to trace the path of our
modest annals through these silent intervals. Incidentally the
Librarian's work has assisted my story; for, although the recovered
folios did not touch the exact year of my search, the pursuit of them
led me to what I may claim as a discovery of my own. I found what I
could not say was wholly lost, but what, until Mr. Ridgely's
exploration drew attention to the records, might have been said to
have shrunk from all notice of the present generation, and to be fast
falling a prey to the tooth of time and the visit of the worm. A few
years more of neglect and the ill usage of careless custodians, and
it would have passed to that depository of things lost upon the
earth, which fable has placed in the moon. It was my good fortune, in
this upturning of relics of the past, to lay my hand upon a sadly
tattered and decayed MS. volume,--unbound, without beginning and
without end, coated with the dust which had been gathering upon it
ever since Chalmers and Bozman had done their work of deciphering its
quai