If by waving a magician's wand the English-American colonies on the Atlantic slope, as they existed in 1738, could pass before us, wherein would the tableau differ from that of to-day? West of the Alleghanies there were the Indians and the French. On the north were 50,000 prosperous French, farmers chiefly along the valley of the St. Lawrence from Montreal to Quebec. On the east, Acadie, including Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and a part of Maine, was Scotch. Florida was Spanish. From Georgia to Maine were 1,500,000 English-Americans and 400,000 African-Americans. The colony of New York had a population of 60,100. New Hampshire, consisting of a few thousand settlers, was located north and east of the Merrimac, and had a legislature of its own, but no governor. Massachusetts, with its charters from James I. and Charles I., claimed the country to the Pacific Ocean, and exercised ownership between the Merrimac and Connecticut and west of the Connecticut, without a breath of opposition from any mortal. Massachusetts had sold land as her own which she found to be in Connecticut, and she paid that state for it by granting her many thousand acres in three of the southeastern townships of Vermont. She built and sustained a fort in Brattleboro', kept a garrison there with a salaried chaplain, salaried resident Indian commissioner, and she established a store supplied with provisions, groceries, and goods suitable for trade with frontiersmen and the Indians of Canada. Bartering was actively carried on along the Connecticut River, Black River, Otter Creek, and Lake Champlain. In 1737 a solemn ratification of the old treaty occurred there; speeches were made, presents given, and the healths of George II. and Governor Belcher, of Massachusetts, were duly drunk. There was no Anglo-Saxon settlement in Vermont outside of Brattleboro'. In Pownal were a few families of Dutch squatters. The Indian village of St. Francis, midway between Montreal and Quebec, peopled partly by New England refugees from King Philip's war of 1676, exercised supreme control over northeastern Vermont. In all the land were only three colleges: Harvard, one hundred and two years old, Yale, thirty-seven, and William and Mary, forty-five.