Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. I.djvu/414

Rh persecuted children of the old world; yes, when she gave to all persecuted, oppressed, or unhappy human beings, the opportunity and the means of beginning anew, a new life, a new hope, a new and more happy development.

The noble Coligny, in France, long ago cast his glance towards South Carolina as a place of refuge for the Huguenots. And when persecution broke forth in all its unbounded ferocity, they who could save themselves fled hither across the sea to the land which rumour had described as the pride and envy of North America, and where, throughout the year, every month had its own flowers—which last is perfectly true.

“We quitted home by night, leaving the soldiers in their beds, and abandoning the house with its furniture,” says Judith, the young wife of Pierre Manigault. “We contrived to hide ourselves for ten days at Romans, in Dauphigny, while a search was made for us; but our faithful hostess would not betray us. After our arrival in Carolina we suffered every kind of evil. In eighteen months my eldest brother, unaccustomed to the hard labour which we were obliged to undergo, died of a fever. Since leaving France we had experienced every kind of affliction, disease, pestilence, famine, poverty, hard labour. I have been for six months without tasting bread, working the ground like a slave; and I have passed three or four years without having it when I wanted it. And yet God has done great things for us, in enabling us to bear up under so many trials.” The son of Judith Manigault, who became an affluent man, entrusted the whole of his large property, during the war of American Independence, “for the use of the country which had adopted his mother.” From Languedoc, from Rochelle, from Saintange, from Bourdeaux, and from many other French towns and provinces, fled the persecuted families who “had all the virtues of Puritans,