With the opening of the seventeenth century were planted the first English colonies in America. Humble merchants and pilgrims, wanderers going forth in frail ships to find uncertain lands, holding as their titles vague charters from King James, landed at Jamestown and on Plymouth Rock.’ With a. world to divide, monarchs were generous in those days, and did their rude surveying on the council table, using parallels of latitude and unknown seas for boundaries, It mattered little that the London and Plymouth companies were granted lands overlapping by three degrees of latitude, for as neither was allowed to settle within a hundred miles of the other, there was no danger of bad neighbors. When, to rectify all errors, the London Company received new boundaries, they were described as extending two hundred miles from Old Point Comfort along the Atlantic coast in each direction, north and south, and “up into the ‘land from sea to sea, west and northwest “a line which was afterward held to give to Virginia the greater part of North America. There was no contest for possession of the continent in those early days. Hudson leisurely sailed up the river which now bears his name and claimed it for the Dutch. Gustavus Adolphus, the ” Snow King ” of the North, without opposition, sent his hardy Swedes to the Delaware peninsula. The French went fishing off the foggy coasts of Newfoundland, claimed the gulf and river of St Lawrence for their King, and built their rude huts amid the snows of Acadia. The English settlements were small and feeble communities, trembling between the sea and the wilderness, There is something sublime in the spectacle of this great unexplored continent, guarding the rich treasures of its vast interior by grim sentinels of gloomy forest, confronting with a frown that narrow, halting strip of civilization, whose frail forces, in spite of early poverty and weakness, were destined to become its imperious master. For a hundred years it seemed a most unequal contest. A handful of log-houses clustered about the fortified church, a few acres of cultivated land not far away, little groups of coarsely clad human figures laboring in the fields with rifles near at hand, the infrequent arrival of a storm-beaten shipthese were the only signs of the coming transformation which for generations met the sharp glance of the stealthy savage as he crept to the edge of the forest to observe the course of the white man’s life.