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 superior evils in the old world, to be discouraged by, or to shrink from, any of those which hung upon their progress in the new.