the present State of West
Virginia was a part of Virginia. Virginia, in the old days, used to have
no western borders to her most westerly counties, which, in theory, ran
out to infinity. As the western part of the State became settled, county
lines were drawn, and new counties were started farther back from the
coast. For this reason, towns which are now in Jefferson County, West
Virginia, used to be in that county of Virginia which lies to the east
of Jefferson County, and some towns have been in several different
counties in the course of their history.

The people in the eastern part of West Virginia are, so far as I am
capable of judging, precisely like Virginians. The old houses, when
built, were in Virginia, the names of the people are Virginian names,
and customs and points of view are Virginian. Until I went there I was
not aware how very much this means.

I do not know who wrote the school history I studied as a boy, but I do
know now that it was written by a lopsided historian, and that his
"lop," like that of many another of his kind, led him to enlarge upon
American naval and military victories, to minimize American defeats, to
give an impression that the all-important early colonies were those of
New England, and that the all-important one of them was Massachusetts.
From this bias I judge that the historian was a Boston man. It takes a
Bostonian to think in that way. They do it still.

From my school history I gathered the idea that although Sir Walter
Raleigh and Captain John Smith were so foolish as to dally more or less
in the remote fastnesses of Virginia, and although there was a little
ineffectual settlement at Jamestown, all the important colonizing of
this country occurred in New England. I read about Peregrine White, but
not about Virginia Dare; I read much of Miles Standish, but nothing of
Christopher Newport; I read a great deal of the _Mayflower_, but not a
word of the _Susan Constant_.

Yet Virginia Dare, if she lived, must have been nearing young ladyhood
when Peregrine White was born; Captain Christopher Newport passed the
Virginia capes when Miles Standish was hardly more than a youth, in
Lancashire; and the _Susan Constant_ landed the Jamestown settlers more
than a dozen years before the _Mayflower_ landed her shipload of eminent
furniture owners at Plymouth. Even Plymouth itself had been visited
years before by John Smith, and it was he, not the Pilgrims, who named
the place.

I fin