Page:History of Delaware County (1856).djvu/224

 200 HISTORY OP In the winter of that year they returned to Connecticut for their families, and to bid adieu to their native State. They were soon joined by others, and the settlements grew with almost unparalleled rapidity. It was only a few years before the forests began to disappear, and the music of the black- smith's hammer, mingled with the buzzing of saw-mills, might be heard in every valley, and the rude log-hut began to give place to the handsome farm-house. Many incidents might be enumerated in regard to the early settlers, to illustrate more fully the prominent traits of their character. Man is emphatically a being of custom ; his nature possesses all the elasticity that enables him to conform to any society or rank in life, or to any age in the world. We have examples in history, of fond children, who have been torn from their mothers' arms and carried into captivity, where they were subject to the hardships and privations of a savage mode of existence. As they grew up the scenes of early childhood were gradually worn away, and by degrees they became accustomed to the associations and wild sports of their savage companions ; indeed, they have thrown around them the most powerful fascinations, and when the boon of civilization has been freely proifered them, the ransom paid, and friends and parents ready to embrace them, they have turned gloomily away and buried themselves again in the forest, and sought their accustomed haunts. Allowing the influence, then, of early customs on the pas- sions, the appetites, and propensities, which make up the character and control the destinies of men, we are prepared more correctly to form a true estimate of the avant couriers of civilization. When we remember that they had just emerged from a long Eevolutionary struggle, which had been pregnant with hope and fear, inlaid with peculiar privations — that eventual success had crowned the efforts, not of numbers but of courage and susceptibility of endurance — we will then