New York was stunted in her growth for a short time, in 1741, by the report of a negro plot. It turned out, however, to be “a great cry and little wool.” Yet on the bare suspicion of a design to burn the city, more than thirty slaves were judicially massacred. The golden waves of commerce, however, soon closed over the momentary plunge of the sable coffins, and the delusion, like that at Salem half a century before, rippled away from the spot in widening circles until it broke upon the historic shore. Some events, insignificant at the time, grow larger as they approach the higher land of civilization; others, magnified by local passion, soon sink forever out of sight. The former are buoyed up by the life-floats of principle; the latter, unworthy of salvage, break and vanish. Thus the contests of the colonists with the proprietors, slowly marking the advancing tide of civil freedom, are hardened on the shore line of our past history. Although they themselves were too busy in making to study the results when accomplished, their descendants, from more cultivated heights, ponder carefully the wave-tracks, as geologists mark and measure the traces of ancient sea-marks in coal-beds, overlaid to-day with the weighty accumulations of ages. On the other hand, the petty struggles in Virginia, Massachusetts, and South Carolina to establish ecclesiastical supremacy, and in other Colonies to set up sumptuary laws prescribing the number, cost, or cut of garments, although at the time tossing up great masses of foam, like foam speedily dissolved into nothingness.