The descendants of these unions on the James and Potomac would have been more numerous had not their numbers been thinned off by Indian knives, which were very busy in 1622, 1623, and 1644–1646. This last war was followed, three years later, by a petty imitation of the civil strife which had raged for seven years between the Parliament and Charles I. in England, and which ended, in the latter country, by taking off the king’s head, and in Virginia by taking away many of their former constitutional privileges. Cromwell fumigated them thoroughly in their own tobacco-smoke, until all the smell of loyalty was gone. Upon the accession of Charles II., in 1660, arbitrary legislation was sought here, as in England, to stamp out the rights of the people which had silently but steadily grown up into a stiff crop; but resistance followed, and in this struggle between Virginia and the crown the succeeding years were spent, until 1754. The principal event in the history of the settlement of North Carolina was the fancy constitution furnished for it in 1669, by John Locke, whose understanding about it differed wholly from that of the people, through whose heads it never could be got. Besides having plenty of time on his hands, Locke made his constitution so long, and divided it up into so many parts, that the youngest settler died before he had read it half through, and bequeathed the further perusal of it to his descendants, with all his shares in what it most resembled,—the Dismal Swamp. A sniff of this vague, shadowy constitution, or bundle of airy rights, by the adjacent settlement of South Carolina, affected her with such a fit of sneezing, that it kept on from that time until 1865, and from which she only found relief now and then in her cotton pocket-handkerchiefs. We may remark that it is a vulgar error to suppose that the rivers in South Carolina run up hill,—just as it is a common mistake to believe that the Tar River, in North Carolina, originates in a turpentine district, and flows in a thick stream into Pamlico Sound. We may as well, also, correct the almost universal notion, that the inhabitants of Charleston have a particular fondness for fire as a steady, every-day diet. The chief incident which marked the uneventful record of the Georgia settlement was the advent, in 1736, of John Wesley. He preached in the Methodist language to the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees; but those short-lived tribes, attending on a certain occasion one of his camp-meetings, and listening to the benevolent missionary giving out one of his brother Charles’s hymns, became so discouraged that they went back to their own camp and ways.