"Motion was in their days, rest in their slumbers, And cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil. Nor yet too many nor too few their numbers; Corruption could not make their hearts her soil; The lust which stings, the splendor which encumbers, With the free foresters divide no spoil; Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes Of this unsighing people of the woods.'" We quote these beautiful lines, because they so aptly and forcibly describe the peculiar character of Boone; and to a certain extent, as Mr. Wheeler intimates, his character was that of his times and of his associates. It was during the residence of the family on the banks of the Yadkin, that Boone formed the acquaintance of Rebecca Bryan, whom he married.[7] The marriage appears, by comparison of dates, to have taken place in the year 1755. "One almost regrets," says Mr. Peck, "to spoil so beautiful a romance, as that which has had such extensive circulation in the various 'Lives of Boone,' and which represents him as mistaking the bright eyes of this young lady, in the dark, for those of a deer; a mistake that nearly proved fatal from the unerring rifle of the young hunter. Yet in truth, we are bound to say, that no such mistake ever happened. Our backwoods swains never make such mistakes." The next five years after his marriage, Daniel Boone passed in the quiet pursuits of a farmer's life, varied occasionally by hunting excursions in the woods. The most quiet and careless of the citizens of North Carolina were not unobservant, however, of the political aspect of the times. During this period the people, by their representatives in the Legislature, began that opposition to the Royal authority, which was in after years to signalize North Carolina as one of the leading Colonies in the Revolutionary struggle. The newly-appointed Royal Governor, Arthur Dobbs, arrived at Newbern in the autumn of 1754. "Governor Dobbs's administration of ten years," says the historian Wheeler, "was a continued contest between himself and the Legislature, on matters frivolous and unimportant. A high-toned temper for Royal prerogatives on his part, and an indomitable resistance of the Colonists ... The people were much oppressed by Lord Grenville's agents. They seized Corbin, his agent, who lived below Edenton, and brought him to Enfield, where he was compelled to give bond and security to produce his books and disgorge his illegal fees." This matter of illegal fees was part of a system of oppression, kindred to the famous Stamp Act--a system which was destined to grow more and more intolerable under Governor Tryon's administration, and to lead to the formation of the famous company of Regulators, whose resistance of taxation and tyranny was soon to convulse the whole State.