The colonists had early learned the strength which comes from union. From 1643 onwards for forty years the New England settlements joined hands with each other against the French of New France and Acadia, the French Indian allies, and the Dutch of New York; and while, like man and wife, they had their own healthy troubles, curtain lectures, poutings and make-ups, they stoutly defended the common home against all neighboring invasion. Persons once married are not apt to forget it, nor cease to sigh, after the tie is dissolved, for the benefits which accrued from it. The colonial widowers found it easier afterwards to contract a new union than the bachelor communities to form their first match. Eight years after the death of the first union the bereaved New-Englanders went out on a second courtship,—the trysting place being New York,—and there agreed upon a sort of runaway match to Canada. The honeymoon journey was not as pleasant as bridal trips through the Thousand Isles to Montreal and Quebec now are. In fact, although bound for Quebec, and even reaching it, they were not suffered by the French to enter it. They returned not over well pleased with each other, but particularly out of temper with the armed discourtesy of the French. This little trip away from home was not the first nor the last which the Colonies were led to make. In fact, our people from the very beginning seem to have been curiously addicted to foreign missionary efforts. They acquired the passion at the outset from European suggestions. Whenever the state skeins there got into a tangle, some of the outside threads were sure to run into a dreadful kink here. No sooner was there a scrubbing and house-cleaning among the old folks on the Thames, Seine, Scheldt, or Rhine, than the brooms were got out on the Hudson, the James, and Connecticut, and up they all went at that standing bother of our colonial housewives, the nest of lively French flies in our northeast corner, or at those old yellow-legged Dutch hornets that had settled down on Manhattan and Long Island. The war between the English and Dutch Commonwealths in 1652, which sent Van Tromp’s broom over the seas, brushing down the red spots of St. George, set the colonial sweepers at work. The big and little brooms were, however, put aside after two years; but in 1663 they were all seized again, and by a single dash New York was swept into the English pan.