Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/267



And there it will stand, bleak and threatening and pitiless, until the earth and the sea shall give up their dead. And as its nature, so its name, is now, always has been, and always will be, the 'Cape of Fear.'"

But the broad sounds and rivers and fertile lands which lay behind these barriers of sand and storm invited immigration, and soon after the middle of the seventeenth century settlers began to pour in by different routes. From Virginia they crowded across into the northern and eastern sections. The Swiss and the Palatines came into the Neuse, and by the middle of the eighteenth century the Highland Scotch were swarming up the Cape Fear, while the Scotch-Irish from Pennsylvania spread over the country on both sides of the Yadkin, and westward to the Catawba, where they were mingled with the Germans, who also came mostly by way of Pennsylvania. Coming into the country by different routes, separated from each other by the unsettled wilderness, finding no centre of power or of influence within the Province to draw them together, each of these sections lived in a measure to itself, and communicated with the outside world through those routes of travel by which each had first entered the country. The Albemarle section