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. Like the hardy Briton, whom,
under the circumstances, we may readily suppose them to have emulated,
they addressed themselves, with little murmuring, to the tasks before them.
We have, at the hands of one of their number, -- a lady born and raised
in affluence at home, -- a lively and touching picture
of the sufferings and duties, which, in Carolina, at that period,
neither sex nor age was permitted to escape. "After our arrival," she writes,
"we suffered every kind of evil. In about eighteen months our elder brother,
unaccustomed to the hard labor we were obliged to undergo,
died of a fever. Since leaving France, we had experienced
every kind of affliction, disease, pestilence, famine, poverty and hard labor!
I have been for six months together without tasting bread,
working the ground like a slave; and I have even passed three or four years
without always having it when I wanted it. I should never have done
were I to attempt to detail to you all our adventures."*

--