o recover from the ruin
wrought by the awful struggle and its aftermath; and in the quiet years
that followed, the Spirit of God brooded over her rivers, hills and
plains, and brought peace and prosperity to the troubled land. Her farms
were tilled again, the wheels of mills and factories were set whirling,
and new business enterprises offered to the laboring man opportunities
to earn a fair living.

And the old colonial town of Hertford, sharing with her sister towns and
cities in the Southland the prosperity for which her children for many
weary, painful years had so bravely and manfully striven, sees the dawn
of a new day, bright with the promise of a happy future for her sons and
daughters.

CHAPTER XIV

CURRITUCK, THE HAUNT OF THE WILD FOWL

Currituck County is known the country over as the sportsman's paradise.
Thither when the first sharp frost gives warning that the clear autumn
skies will soon be banked with gray snow clouds, the wild fowl from the
far North come flocking. And as the swift-winged procession skims
through the starry skies, and the hoarse cry of the aerial voyagers
resounds over head, then do the dwellers in eastern Albemarle know for a
surety that the year is far spent, and the winter days close at hand.

Guided by unerring instinct, the feathered tribes of the North pursue
"through the boundless sky their certain flight" till the shallow waters
of Currituck Sound and its reedy shores greet their eager sight. There
they find the wild celery and other aquatic plants upon which they love
to feed, growing in abundance; and there they make their winter home
"and rest and scream among their fellows," preferring the risk of death
at the hands of the sportsman to the certain starvation that would
confront them in their native Arctic clime.

Vast as are to-day the clouds of wild fowl that every year descend upon
the shores and waters of Currituck, their numbers were far greater in
years long gone, before the white man with shot and gun came roving
among the reedy marshes. Long before George Durant's advent into the
State, the Indians with that aptness for nomenclature for which they are
noted, had given to this haunt of the wild fowl the name of "Coretonk,"
or Currituck, as now called, in imitation of the cry of the feathered
visitors.

But not alone as the winter home of the winged creatures of the Northern
wilds was Currituck noted in the early days of our State. This county,
formerly