In this timing of events the Huguenot Pilgrims discerned a divine adjustment of means to ends as real and apt as was that traced by the Israelites in the predicted exaltation of the youthful Joseph to that ancient ' Lordship ' that prepared their way to the land of promise. Of the fine qualities of character exemplified by these heroic people, and the possibilities of their future, he was thoroughly appreciative. How different might have been their fortunes bad he, like some leading men of the period, favored the exclusive policy of the reigning monarch by whom the manorial charter had been granted, and whose measures, ere long, rendered the English Revolution a logical necessity. But all anti-

1 Volume ii., p. 51.

pathies were overruled, and in the annals of the following century we trace the gr.ulual growth of a well-ordered anil happy community, distinguished by an inherited refinement of manners and a degree of intellectual culture that made New Roclielle of Pelham what the legal phnise of the charter designated the manor, * a place of itself;' unique ; winning to its homes and schools the best elements of family life and social advancement. At the opening of the nineteenth century, the French language, spoken in purity and elegance, still lived as the vernacular of home life, attracting the more progressive class of students, whereof the names of Washington Irving, John Jay, Philip Schuyler, and I louverne\tr Morris may be taken as exponents. A few who were chiMien at that period are yet living, and remember the ladies who, like ^lary Bcslie, the sister of Dr. Oliver Beslie, possessed home libraries containing the standard works of French Literature that had nourished the intellectual youth of their mothers in France. As it has been wellsaid by Macaulay, that the fusion of Norman and Saxon elements in the thirteenth century produced the Englami that has figured as a power in a wtirld of history, so that we may truly say that the fusion of English and French elements in this manorial tract, bought originally of the Indians by Thom;is Pell, Esq., in 16j4, confirmed by an English King, James II, iis a " lordship,'" in IfiST, produced a social growth of fine typal character, and furnished a contribution distinctively its own to the progress of American Colonial civilization.