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and sagacious. More flexible in their habits than the English, they
conciliated the latter by deference; and, soothing the unruly passions
of the Indians--the Santee and Sewee tribes, who were still in
considerable numbers in their immediate neighborhood--they won them
to alliance by kindness and forbearance. From the latter, indeed, they
learned their best lessons for the cultivation of the soil. That, upon
which they found themselves, lay in the unbroken forest. The high
lands which they first undertook to clear, as less stubborn, were most
sterile; and, by a very natural mistake, our Frenchmen adopted the
modes and objects of European culture; the grains, the fruits and
the vegetables, as well as the implements, to which they had been
accustomed. The Indians came to their succor, taught them the
cultivation of maize, and assisted them in the preparation of their
lands; in return for lessons thought equally valuable by the savages, to
whom they taught, along with gentler habits and morals, a better taste
for music and the dance! To subdue the forest, of itself, to European
hands, implied labors not unlike those of Hercules. But the refugees,
though a gentle race, were men of soul and strength, capable of great
sacrifices, and protracted self-denial. Accommodating themselves with
a patient courage to the necessities before them, they cheerfully
undertook and accomplished their tasks. We have more than one lively
picture among the early chroniclers of the distress and hardship which
they were compelled to encounter at the first. But, in this particular,
there was nothing peculiar in their situation. It differed in no respect
from that which fell to the lot of all the early colonists in America.
The toil of felling trees, over whose heavy boughs and knotty arms
the winters of centuries had passed; the constant danger from noxious
reptiles and beasts of prey, which, coiled in the bush or crouching in
the brake, lurked day and night, in waiting for the incautious victim;
and, most insidious and fatal enemy of all, the malaria of the swamp,
of the rank and affluent soil, for the first time laid open to the sun;
these are all only the ordinary evils which encountered in America,
at the very threshold, the advances of European civilisation. That the
Huguenots should meet these toils and dangers with the sinews and
the hearts of men, was to be expected from their past experience and
history. They had endured too many and too