the colony—and a few picked men, with a view to selecting the best spot for a first settlement, resulting in the selection of an Indian village which Calvert succeeded in purchasing from the Indians, with whom also he made an offensive and defensive treaty. To the village thus chosen the name of St. Mary's was given, and to the neck of land in which it was situated that of St. Mary's Point. With truly marvelous rapidity a town of comfortable houses gathered about the native wigwams, and the colony seemed likely shortly to rival in prosperity that of its older neighbor, Virginia, when that neighbor, which had from the first viewed its very existence with jealousy, picked a quarrel with its governor, which finally developed into a bitter war, extending over many years.
As will readily be imagined, this unhappy state of things was terribly detrimental to the progress of an infant community; but in 1635, peace was so far restored that we find Lord Baltimore making extensive grants of land to new settlers, and in 1637 reference is made in historical documents to the "hundreds" into which the country of St. Mary's had been divided. The loss of the MS. records of Maryland, to which early writers of the colony refer the reader for full details of its growth, renders it impossible to trace the gradual exploration of the country contained within its present boundaries; but enough has, we trust, been said to account for the presence of the Roman Catholic element in the Southern States of America, and to fit the story of Maryland into that mere outline of the early history of the colonies which is all that the nature of our subject requires. For many touching anecdotes of the ways of the Indians we are indebted to the Jesuit Father White, who, after long ministering to the spiritual necessities of his fellow-countrymen in St. Mary's, wandered about in the wild and beautiful districts on the northern banks of the Potomac, striving to instruct the savages in the mysteries of the Roman Catholic religion. But whatever the discoveries made by him in the various phases of human nature with which he came in contact, he added nothing to our geographical knowledge, and we must, leaving his work and that of many another noble missionary to be recorded elsewhere, turn from the two youngest of the Southern States to tell the romantic story of the planting of sister communities along the rocky shores so long known under the general name of New England.
