the customs, the ordered ways of white people's existence. A night must
come when they would arise silently, resume with a deep in-breathing of
delight the deerskin raiment, and be gone without one last loving look at
the faces of those who had given them life, but from whom their souls were
forever parted. There is a harrowing mystery in these estrangements: how
strong, and yet how helpless is the human heart; all the world cannot
break the bonds it ties, nor can all the world tie them again, once the
heart itself has dissolved them.

Thus, in more ways than one, the blood of the English colonists became
wedded to the soil of the wilderness, if wilderness the settlements could
now be called. And they became like the captives we have just been
imagining, who cared no longer for the land and the people that had been
their home. Not more because they were estranged by England's behavior
than because they had formed new attachments beside which the old ones
seemed pale, were they now able to contemplate with composure the idea of
a final separation. America was no longer England's daughter. She had
acquired a life of her own, and could look forward to a destiny which the
older country could never share. The ways of the two had parted more fully
than either, as yet, quite realized; and if they were ever to meet
again hereafter, it must be the older, and not the younger, who must
change.

Apart from the Indian episodes, little was done until 1710, when a large
fleet left Boston and again captured Port Royal, to which the name of
Annapolis was given as a compliment to the snuffy little woman who sat on
the English throne. This success was made the basis of a proposition to
put an end to the development of the French settlements west of the
Alleghanies. It was represented to the English government that the entire
Indian population in the west was being amalgamated with the French; the