This was the first interchange of gubernatorial civilities ever known in America. It was certainly unique. One governor lent the other his mare to ride home upon, gave him a guide on whose shoulders he could be ferried across a rapid stream, and entertained his guest by beseeching him to “prophesy” on the Sabbath, and by gently reminding him that the contribution-box was empty. Such was the homely, hearty, frank hospitality of the Pilgrim fathers over two hundred years ago. Such were the manners and customs of New England when Brewster “prophesied” and when Winthrop and Bradford governed. Looking back across two centuries, we smile; but perhaps, with all its super-refinement, modern hospitality is no whit in advance of that which contented Winthrop, and of which it may be said, “There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas, That grew the more by reaping.” In this same year of Winthrop’s visit to Plymouth, the Pilgrims had their first boundary quarrel with the French. The extent of Acadia to the west was long a subject of dispute.[774] The lands which bordered on the rival boundaries became a “debatable” ground. Bradford and his coadjutors had erected a trading station on the Penobscot. This was now assaulted, and “despoiled of five hundred pounds worth of beaver-skins, besides a store of coats, rugs, blankets, biscuits;” and insult was added to injury; for the cavalier Frenchmen bade the tenants of the plundered post tell the English that “some gentlemen of the Isle of Rhé had been there to leave their compliments.”[775] This taunt was not instantly responded to. Indeed, it was put out at interest, and remained unsettled until the next century, when these “religious English” gave the intruders indefinite leave of absence from Canada, and settled the boundary question by annexing the whole territory. As an offset to their loss on the eastern rivers, the Plymouth Pilgrims began to push their enterprise towards the west. “Rumor, with its thousand tongues,” had frequently hymned the praises of the Eldorado of Connecticut. The phlegmatic Dutchman, so cold on other themes, kindled on this, and actually took his pipe out of his mouth, that he might speak more freely. The taciturn Indian melted into profuse and graphic eloquence when he painted the beauty and fertility of these western bottom-lands.[776] These glowing reports at length won the Pilgrims, tied at first by the necessity of overcoming a contiguous wilderness, to scout in that region. Parties visited the banks of the “Fresh river,” as the Dutch styled it,[777] or the _Connecticut_, as it soon came to be called, “not without profit,” finding it “a fine place both for planting and for trade.”[778]