It has been observed that colonists are often preceded in the woods by bees: these are the van-guard of the tillers of the soil, and the symbols of the industry and civilization whose coming they proclaim. Foreign to America, these peaceful conquerors came in the wake of Columbus' sails, and have robbed a new world of flowers of those treasures only of whose use the natives were ignorant; nor have they employed those treasures other than to enrich the soil whence they derived them. The clearings along both sides of the road which I travelled displayed a curious mixture of the state of nature and the state of civilization. In one comer of a wood which had never known any sound save the yells of the savage and the belling of the stag, one came across a ploughed field; one saw from the same point of view the wigwam of an Indian and the dwelling of a planter. Some of these dwellings, when completed, reminded one of the neatness of the Dutch farm-houses; others were only half finished, and had nothing but the sky for a roof. [Sidenote: Indians and settlers.] I was welcomed in these dwellings, the results of a morning's work; often I would find a family displaying European elegancies, mahogany furniture, a piano, carpets, mirrors, at a few steps from the hut of an Iroquois. In the evening, when the farm-servants returned from working in the woods or fields with the axe or the hoe, the windows were opened. My host's daughters, with their beautiful fair hair dressed in ringlets, would sing, to the accompaniment of the piano, the duet from Paisiello's[484] _Pandolfetto_ or some _cantabile_ by Cimarosa[485], all in full view of the wilderness, and sometimes to the murmuring sound of a waterfall. Small market-towns rose in the better districts. The spire of a new steeple shot up from the midst of an old forest. The English are accompanied by English customs wherever they go: after crossing districts containing no trace of habitation, I came upon the sign of an inn swinging from the bough of a tree. Hunters, planters, and Indians mingled at these caravansaries: the first time I rested there, I swore that it should be the last.