For four years they enjoyed the happiness of belonging once more to the 'land of steady habits.' And then in 1700, the king's order in Council placed them back within the jurisdiction they had renounced, 'forever thereafter to be and remain under the government of the Province of New York.' The people acquiesced in this decision ; and the following action of the town is the record of the last protest made against an unrighteous procedure to which they were obliged in the end to submit: --

'At a lawful towne meeting held in Rye, September the 29, 1701, Deliverance Browne, senior, is chosen to goe down to New York to make the town's aggrievances knowne unto the Governor and Council, and alsoe to make inquiry conclared, on arriving here, that the titles of the colonists to their lands were of no value at alt. Indian deeds, he said, were 110 better than the scratch of a bear's paw. 'Not the fairest purchases and the most ample conveyances from the natives,' remarks Trumbull, - no dangers, disbursements, nor labors in cultivating a wilderness, and turning it into orchards, gardens, and pleasant fields, no grants by charter, nor by legislatures constituted by them, DO declarations of pretending kings, nor of Ins then present majesty, were pleas of any validity or consideration with Sir Edmund and his minions. The purchasers and cultivators, after fifty ami sixty years' improvement, were obliged to take out patents for their estates. For these. In some Instances, a fee of fifty pounds was demanded. Writs of intrusion were issued against persons of principal character who would not submit to such impositions, and their lands were patented to others.' (History of Connecticut, 1, 373.)