differences
with the Government at home, which refused to reimburse him for money
spent; wrangling with the Assembly, which refused money for the
conduct of affairs in the colony; the uprising of negro slaves; the
turbulent actions of unfriendly Indians--these things and others left
him never an hour for the work he had planned. It was a note of
despair that he sounded when he wrote to Swift across the sea:

This is the finest air to live upon in the universe, and if
our trees and birds could speak and our Assemblymen be
silent, the finest conversation also. The soil bears all
things, but not for me.... In a word, and to be serious, I
have spent my time here in such torment and vexation that
nothing hereafter in life can ever make amends for it.

Still, for all this, he found time for some writing, especially for a
play, the one called _Androborus_--The Man-eater,--in which he wrote
in such a bantering, humorous, satirical manner of the colonial
officers as to set the town going with laughter. From this on he got
along better and the people came to appreciate their Governor.
Gradually there centred about the house in the fort a "Court Circle,"
where the Lady Hunter shone brightly, not alone because she was the
first lady of the province, nor because her husband was Governor and a
writer, but because others came to know her as a loving, lovely, and
lovable woman. But when it looked as though the Governor was to have
at last the ease and rest and quiet he had hoped for from the
beginning, Lady Hunter died! This was the worst that could happen to
Robert Hunter. There was nothing more for him to live and struggle
for, he said. He resigned his office and, before many years, his life.

At this time of the "Court Circle," a mild, quiet man, the son of a
Presbyterian minister, came from Philadelphia to visit the Governor.
And no one could foresee that this Cadwallader Colden would remain
during the rest of his life and be, for almost half a century, the
leader of literary New York.

Colden came to be a friend of William Bradford, as he had been of
Hunter, and watched his work with deep interest. He often advised
Bradford when that first printer of New York published the _New York
Gazette_, in 1725, the first newspaper in the city, and upheld him a
few years later when the second newspaper was issued by Bradford's old
apprentice boy, Peter Zenger, who had become his rival.

In the first ten y