Well, however, was it for North Carolina that she thus took the law into her own hands; tranquillity was restored. Mighty changes were in the meantime taking place in England; the Revolution of 1688 was overturning not only political parties, but the very constitution itself. But neither the strife of parties; nor the removal of the crown from one royal head to another, mattered in North Carolina; where, at length, peace and prosperity were established. “The settlers of North Carolina,” we are told, “began now to enjoy to their hearts’ content liberty of conscience and personal independence, the freedom of the forest and the river. The country of itself was of the most agreeable character. From almost every plantation they enjoyed the noble prospect of spacious rivers, of pleasant meadows, of primeval forests, where the loftiest branches of the tulip-tree or magnolia were wreathed with jessamines and honeysuckles. For them the wild bee stored its honey in hollow trees; for them, unnumbered swine fattened on the fruits of the forest, or the heaps of peaches; for them, spite of their careless lives and imperfect husbandry, cattle multiplied on the pleasant savannahs; and they desired no greater happiness than they enjoyed. North Carolina was settled by the freest of the free; they were not so much caged in the woods as scattered in lonely granges. There was neither city nor township; there was hardly even a hamlet, or one house within sight of another; nor were there roads, except as the paths from house to house were distinguished by notches on the trees. The settlers were gentle in their tempers, of serene minds, enemies to violence and bloodshed. Not all the successive revolutions had kindled vindictive feelings; the charities of life were scattered at their feet like the flowers on their meadows; and the spirit of humanity maintained its influence in the Arcadia, as royalist writers will have it, of rogues and rebels in the paradise of Quakers.”[6] We have already related how, in 1670, the year in which the Grand Model Constitution was signed, a company of emigrants were sent out, at the expense of £12,000 to the proprietaries, under the command of William Sayle, a military officer and Presbyterian, who, twenty years before, had attempted to plant a colony in the Bahama Isles, under the somewhat unintelligible title of an Eleutheria, and who, mere latterly, had been employed by the proprietaries in exploring the coasts of their province. These emigrants were accompanied by Joseph West, as commercial agent of the proprietaries, authorised to supply the settlers with provisions, cattle, implements and all other necessaries; a trade being commenced for this purpose with Virginia, Bermuda and Barbadoes.