fortifications and the white houses of Frederica. Behind rose a dense forest of oaks. “This cottage and fifty acres of land attached to it,” says the honorable Thomas Spalding in his “Sketch of the life of General James Oglethorpe,”[99] “was all the landed domain General Oglethorpe reserved to himself, and after the General went to England it became the property of my father.... After the Revolutionary war, the buildings being destroyed, my father sold this little property. But the oaks were only cut down within four or five years past, and the elder people of St. Simons yet feel as if it were sacrilege, and mourn their fall.” Here the defences of St. Simons island were under his immediate supervision. His troops were around him, and he was prepared, upon the first note of warning, to concentrate the forces of the Colony for active operations. In the neighborhood several of his officers established their homes. Among them, “Harrington Hall,”—the country seat of the wealthy Huguenot, Captain Raymond Demeré, enclosed with hedges of cassina,—was conspicuous for its beauty and comfort. Including the soldiers and their families, Frederica in 1740 is said to have claimed a population of one thousand.[100] This estimate is perhaps somewhat exaggerated, although much nearer the mark than that of the discontents Tailfer, Anderson, and Douglas, who, in their splenetic and jacobinical tract entitled “A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia in America,” assert that of the one hundred and forty-four lots into which the town was divided, only “about fifty were built upon,” and that “the number of the Inhabitants, notwithstanding of the Circulation of the Regiment’s money, are not over _one hundred and twenty_ Men, Women, and Children, and these are daily stealing away by all possible Ways.”[101]