The time and labor expended upon clearing the ground and raising grain met with little or no reward. The products could not be sold nor exchanged for necessaries of life. Consequently the forests remained quite undisturbed for many years and agriculture neglected, excepting for the necessary consumption of the family. The early settler, however, was not all the time free from discouragements. His domestic animals frequently became lost, or destroyed by ravenous beasts; and diseases of the country occasionally were protracted; and to the wife and children, he sometimes felt, it was not so much a paradise. But he came to stay, and this, for better or for worse, was his home, and submitted philosophically to circumstances and events he could not control. The wife and mother endured with patience and heroism all privations and afflictions equally with the husband and father, and performed the arduous household duties; and, like the model woman of old, “sought wool and flax and worked willingly with her hands,” and the whirring spinning-wheel and thudding loom were heard in most every household. The welfare of the family depended upon the success of home industries, and consequently the wife had much less leisure than the husband. She superintended the manufacture of all the fabrics for the house and for the clothing of the family, and cut and made up the same without protection, tariff, rebate, or combine. And it is singular so little has been recorded of the good women who unlocked the resources of the new territory and gave their aid in founding a civilization that has surpassed all precedents in the history of nations. Natives of every country and of every grade of intelligence in the new environment became alike distinguished for liberality and hospitality--ever desirous to forget the past, willing to admit the future, and ready to enjoy the present, the life of the pioneer was seldom darkened or overburdened with toil or care, and had times of good cheer, and was not without his social amusements. The violin and Monongahela whisky found way to the settlements and were accepted by many, young and old; and the dance after a quilting, shooting-match, fox-chase, bear-hunt, log-rolling, or house-raising gave all the pleasure and excitement desired. As the population became more numerous, leisure and the desire for amusements increased; and among the many ways devised to entertain and interest, no one, perhaps, ever received more attention, higher cultivation, and obtained more general favor than the chase. Most descendants of Virginia, however destitute in other respect, had their packs of “hounds,” and the good people and the better, the poor and the poorer, some on horse and some on foot, mingled alike in the exciting sport.