During the bright summer days our settlement prospered cheerily; for although the emigrants were continually hatching new projects which they imagined would be more advantageous than those they were engaged in executing, and certainly never allowed one entire week to pass without afflicting discussion, still, by firmly adhering to the predetermined plan, all went steadily forward. As the year, however, began to decline, and the weather became occasionally wet and broken, new sources of molestation began to open, and some of the men who had behaved with uniform propriety grew less tractable; nor were the women always such amiable and enduring creatures as I could have wished.

The restraint which new scenes, new friends, and new vocations had imposed, began to wear off, and natural tempers and evil habitudes gradually resumed their former ascendancy. With the single exception of Andrew Gimlet the carpenter, not one of all Eric Pullicate's party improved upon acquaintance; none of them, undoubtedly, deserved the name of bad characters, but the emigrant fyke,—if I may use a Scottish word which has no synonyme in English nearer than fidget,—was upon them, and every hour, if it could have admitted of representation, was with them only a time for complaint. It is the nature of all vulgar people to undervalue those little etiquettes which persons of a better station draw around them as a fence from intrusion, and it is, among other usages of the old country, one of the earliest disregarded by the emigrant in the new.