p719-014 CHAPTER I.

“New England, then, for many years
Had had both rest and peace;
But now the case was otherwise—
Her troubles did increase.”
Peter Falger, the Pilgrim poet.

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It was an anxious, as well as a stirring day with the colonists
at New Plymouth. The public mind, for the last few months,
had been laboring under a very unusual, and a constantly increasing
excitement. Among all classes of men there evidently
existed a deep, though unacknowledged consciousness,
that the calculations of selfishness, craft, and fraud, instead of
obedience to the simple dictates of justice and honesty, had
latterly characterized their intercourse with the Indians.
This, as in most other cases of conscious wrong doing, had
made them, especially the leading men of the colony, peculiarly
sensitive respecting the relations in which they stood
with the red men, filling them with jealousies, suspicions, and
apprehensions, lest the latter, impressed doubtless with the
same or livelier convictions of their wrongs, should be secretly
nourishing thoughts and schemes of redress and retribution.
The colonists were also fully conscious that the injured race
were now no longer the comparatively harmless and

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contemptible foes they were in times past, when bows and arrows and
war-clubs were their most formidable weapons, whole scores
of which were scarcely good against a single musket in battle;
but that they had, at this period, almost universally supplied
themselves with fire arms, in the fatal use of which, when
occasion required, they had no superiors, even among the most
expert sharp-shooters of the old world. And especially and
painfully conscious were likewise the leading colonists, that
in addition to the advantages thus possessed by their apprehended
foes, there had now sprung up among them a Master
Spirit who was believed to be fully capable of combining, and
giving direction to all the various elements of their disaffection
with fearful effect. That Master Spirit was Metacom, the
King Philip of subsequent historic renown. And it was not
without reason they feared that he, insulted, fined, and dragooned
as he had been into hollow treaties of peace, would not
long remain inactive or forego—unless prompt and decided
measures were taken to prevent the execution of what was
believed to be his bold and settled design—a war of extermination
against the colonists of New England.

Something therefore it was felt should immediately be done.
And something was done. But, as too often happens among
people laboring under a high degree of excitement and apprehension,
the colonists seemed madly intent on rushing into
measures which hastened on the very event they were so
anxious to avoid. And the consequence was that they soon
plunged their hapless colony into those fearful scenes of blood
and woe, which characterized the year that followed the opening
act of the story on which we are about to enter.

It was a calm and sunny morning in the fore part of the
leafy month of June, 1675. A crowd of loiterers, evidently
awaiting some expected event, were scattered over the smooth
and ample grass plat surrounding the Meeting House of the
first planted village of New England, the noted Plymouth of

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Pilgrim memories. Among the mingled and diversified company
present on the occasion, consisting of villagers, and those
who had come in from the neighboring towns to witness the
public proceedings of the day, were a small party of young
men who, to while away the time of their waiting, had entered
into a contest of markmanship, which being almost the only
kind of amusement countenanced among the young men, by
the over scrupulous elders, was generally engaged in with
great zest, serving the young as a sort of standing exhibition,
in all public gatherings, save those of a religious character.
The contesting party in the present instance, were a half
dozen youngerly men, of ages varying from twenty to thirty,
all supplied with fowling pieces, or hunting guns, of the best
construction for the use of the bullet. Deeming themselves
among the best marksmen of the colony, they had agreed
upon a target, and a distance, which should fully test their
pretensions to nice shooting, the mark being a black ring, four
inches in diameter, with two less visible inner concentric circles,
and a black spot of the size of a half crown in the middle,
all painted on a white board, and placed at the distance
of one hundred yards from the shooting stand. Having all
fired once round, it was seen that four of the contestants,
though all making close shots, had failed to plant their bullets
within the black ring. These having now, by their rules, no
hope of bearing off the palm, voluntarily retired from the contest,
which was thus left to be decided by the remaining two,
who had both sent their balls within the ring, both bullets nearly
alike grazing the next inner circle, and falling consequently
about equi-distant from the centre. The attention of the
crowd, who, by this time, had all gathered round the spot, was
now especially directed to the two remaining candidates for
the palm of victory. In personal appearance, these two rival
marksmen were alike in nothing, save in the evidence of their
similar ages, which were probably twenty-four or twenty-five

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years. One was, for the times, richly and fashionably dressed.
And this circumstance, together with the contemptuous,
sneering expression that rested on his small, unattractive features,
denoted that he was connected with some family of
wealth, and of real, or assumed consequence in the colony,
that he was disposed to plume himself on what he considered
his elevated position in society, and consequently to look upon
the common sort of men, as all well enough in their places,
to be sure, but not exactly fit to be counted among his associates.
The other was a plainly dressed, but noble looking
young man, of a shapely, compact form, and of unusually
handsome features, enlivened with one of those clear, frank,
and firm countenances, which betoken intelligence, good motives,
and cool courage.

“Dick Swain,” said a bystander, beckoning to his side a
short, bustling, restless fellow, with a hooked nose, and a sort
of shiny, unsteady countenance, and at the same time pointing
to the plainly dressed marksman just described, “Dick,
who is that fellow who is so confidently preparing to contest
the palm with Mr. Sniffkin, the English trained marksman?”

“That fellow,” replied the person thus appealed to, coming
up, and speaking in that low, confidential way, common with
men of secretiveness—“his name is Vane Willis, from one
of the neighboring towns,—a bold hunter, and a sure marksman,
they say, he having practiced a good deal with the Indians,
and proved himself a match for the best of them. I
know Mr. Sniffkin is well trained in shooting, and has the
most costly and high finished piece in the colony; but I am
really afraid this Willis, with his heavy, thick barreled gun,
will beat him.”

“Afraid! why afraid?” asked the former. “Every man
has an equal right to the palm, if he can get it, hasn't he?”

“Yes, yes; but then Mr. Sniffkin you know, is the

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nephew of Deacon Mudgridge, and so connected with the Governor,
who was related to the Deacon's wife before she died.
Besides that, Mr. Sniffkin is a member of the church, and that
fellow ain't. And then Mr. Sniffkin prides himself so much
on his skill in shooting. And then again, I suspect, there is
another reason why he wants to beat the fellow—to humble
him—something about a certain girl in this town—you understand,
hey? But stay; they are about to fire!”

Sniffkin was evidently desirous that his rustic rival should
be the first to fire, and, in a tone sounding very much like a
command, requested him to proceed. But the other, with a
slight curl of the lip, and a little sprinkling of irony in his
manner, peremptorily declined that honor; when the privileged
gentleman advanced to the stand, and, after having at
length found a place to rest his piece which satisfied him, he
took a long, careful aim, and fired.

Dick Swain, and four or five others of Sniffkin's obsequious
friends, sprang forward to the target, and soon announced
that the bullet had bored it within half an inch of the small
black spot in the centre.

“Yes, Vane Willis is as good as beat,” cried the exulting
inspectors, as they came swaggering along back to the stand.
“He can never equal that shot.”

“Don't boast quite so soon. We can tell better after Vane has
fired,” retorted the friends of Willis, who were evidently a majority
of the marksmen present, and who now gathered round
their tacitly acknowledged leader, with looks plainly betokening
their confidence of his triumph.

Without pretending to notice the self-satisfied and supercilious
airs of his rival, or the remarks of either party, Vane
quietly advanced to the stand, and, waving off those who were
preparing a place for him to rest his piece, like the one his
competitor had used, raised his gun at arm's length, and almost
instantly fired. So quick and sudden, indeed, did the

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report follow the upward movement of the barrel, that most
of the company supposed that the gun had gone off by accident,
and before it could have been brought to bear on the object
of aim. But on being told by the unruffled young marksman
that he had obtained all the aim he wanted, his friends now,
in their turn, bounded forward for the target. There was a
momentary silence among them at first; and then rose their
exulting shout of victory. The bullet had pierced the very
middle of the black centre mark; and the triumph was complete.

“An arm's length shot against one with a rest, and a clean
victory at that!” cried one of the exulting party.

“It is nothing more than I expected,” added another.
“The fact is, Vane Willis is the best shot in the whole
colony.”

“I dispute that,” said Sniffkin, stung by the applause that
had greeted his opponent, whom, in his ill-concealed spite
and vexation, he was eager to disparage—“I dispute it. This
was doubtless but a mere chance shot.”

“Perhaps it was; but I am quite willing to try it over
again with you,” coolly remarked Vane. “What say you,
sir, shall we thus put the question to the test?”

“No,” replied the other disdainfully; “I may prefer to
choose my own company, when I engage in another contest.
Nathless I dispute the assertion that you are the best shot in
the country.”

“So do I,” rejoined the former; “there is one in the country
whom I know to be my full equal, but his name is not Timothy
Sniffkin.”

“Who is it then, Vane?” asked the one who had made the
disputed assertion.

“It is Metacom.”

“King Philip?”

“Yes, King Philip, of Mount Hope. I have had repeated

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trials with him both in the chase and at a mark. Neither
could claim any advantage over the other from the quality of
his gun; for our guns, which were brought over by two German
sportsmen, some years ago, and sold when they returned,
are precisely alike, being the only ones of the same make in
the colony, probably. They were made expressly for the
bullet, which, by means of a curious winding groove inside
the barrel, as you can see by mine here, is made to whirl as
it goes through the air.* I was lucky enough to secure one;
and Metacom, who has a keen eye for such matters, somehow
soon got hold of the other. And he has since practiced with
such effect, that he has no superior, and probably not a single
equal in quick and accurate shooting, this side of the great
water.

“You seem to have been quite intimate with that vile,
treacherous savage,” maliciously remarked Sniffkin, winking
significantly to his backers.

“Vile and treacherous!” repeated Vane, as with flashing
eye, he advanced and boldly confronted his sneering opponent.
“Would to heaven, that, for the peace and safety of our endangered
colony, the vileness and treachery were all on one
side! But what meant you, sir, by that insinuating remark?”

“Oh, nothing in particular!” replied the former, evidently
surprised, and at first, disconcerted at the fearless confronting

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of the other. “Nothing, in particular; but it may be well
enough,” he added, rallying a little, “to have it known, at
this critical juncture, who those are, that have been consorting
with, and still seem disposed to defend one, who, with his
devilish heathen crew, may soon be arrayed against us in
arms.”

“Yes, sir, and if that time does come,” retorted Willis,
“and this piece, in my hands, with my knowledge of the
enemy, does not as good service on our side, as your piece, in
your hands, then I will agree to bear your taunts in silence.
And I now challenge you, sir, in anticipation of such a time,
to enter with me, on that condition, into the actual contest—
a contest which will better show who is truly the man, and
the marksman, than this by-play of shooting at a mark, where
there are no dangers to be encountered. Yes, sir, I repeat
the challenge; and I have a few friends here, I think,” he added
looking around on the little band of his hardy comrades, who,
as the altercation progressed, drew closer and closer to his
side, with increasing manifestations of their sympathy—“a
few friends, perhaps, who are willing to vouch for me that I
shall not be the first one to back out. Will you go my
vouchers for that, boys?”

A hearty shout of affirmation was the prompt response to
the appeal, which was thus made and answered with the
more emphasis, doubtless, because they all wished to show
the haughty court-minion that one of their number was not to
be put down by sneers, or disparaged by groundless insinuations.

“There! Now you will please remember all this, sir,” resumed
the speaker, pointing to the visibly perplexed and disconcerted
Sniffkin. “And you too, my friends, remember to
hold me to my pledge, for making good my own offer in this
behalf.”

“O, yes,” responded one of those last addressed. “Yes,

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if times should really come, when there is any occasion for
making good such an offer; and it should then be necessary,
which it won't be, to jog your memory, we will do it. But
do you seriously suppose we are likely to see those times,
Willis? Do you think there is actually any danger of our
being involved in an Indian war?”

“Aye, I do think there is much danger of such an event,”
replied the other. “And if our people—especially our rulers—
persist in the course they now seem so intent on taking towards
the already greatly irritated red men, I feel a bloody war
is inevitable.”

“Take notice of that, good people of Plymouth!” eagerly
exclaimed the court lackey, looking round on the crowd with
an air of malicious triumph. “He has shown himself a seeker
of occasions to disparage our rulers and take the part of the
heathen salvages against them. Take notice of it, ye all,
good people, will you?”

“Yes, take notice of it, all who wish,” promptly responded
the other, with increasing earnestness; “and take notice also
of the prediction I now, and here boldly venture to make,
that if these Indian prisoners, whom we are waiting to see
tried here to-day, for the alleged offence of taking the life
of one of their own tribe, who, by their laws, had become a
traitor and an outlaw,—if these prisoners, known to be the
leading men of the tribe, and the councillors of King Philip,
are condemned and executed, there will, before the month's
end, burst upon us a war which may not cease till the very
existence of these colonies is put in jeopardy!”

The startling import of this prediction, together with the
serious and decided manner in which it was uttered, fell with
chilling effect upon the whole company, producing a very
visible sensation, both among those who coincided with the
speaker, in regard to the mistaken policy of their rulers in
their strangely mingled church and state government, and

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among those also who looked upon those rulers as all but infallible
in wisdom and discretion; for it was but giving voice
to an apprehension by which they were all secretly impressed,
however they might differ about the best means of averting
the impending danger. Even the arrogant and self-sufficient
Sniffkin, who had found matter of accusation in the far less
pointed and objectionable remarks previously made by his
hated rival, was now too deeply impressed, or too much astonished
by his bold words and fearless demeanor, to attempt to
gainsay them or renew his ill-natured and ungentlemanly
assault.

The silence that followed the dialogue thus impressively
brought to a close by the out-spoken young marksman, was,
however, soon broken by the startling peals of the churchbell
in the belfry, almost above their heads, which all understood
to betoken the arrival of the hour of the expected trial,
that was to be held in the Meeting House, around which they
were assembled, and soon the roll of a drum at the head-quarters
of the Governor, his assistants, and the church dignitaries,
of whom the court was to be composed, announced that the
military guards were then mustering, preparatory to bringing
out the prisoners and forming a procession for the place of
trial. All eyes were therefore expectantly turned in that direction.
But the eager spectators were not to be very immediately
gratified by the appearance of any coming procession.
The bell-man, in obedience to some signal made from the
Governor's house, soon ceased to ring the bell. The drum
ceased beating, and every thing indicated that there was to be
a temporary delay of proceedings at head-quarters. And instead
of the expected retinue, a solitary man made his appearance,
coming from that direction. His hurried motions, as
indicated, in the distance, by the rapid bobbing up and
down of his tall, steeple-shaped hat, and the quick, regular
outward flaunting of the skirts of his long, tunic-like coat, all

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moving in correspondence with his steps as he advanced,
seemed to show that he was bound on some mission requiring
special despatch; and his appearance under the circumstances,
consequently, very naturally soon attracted the attention
of the expected company.

“Who is that tall man coming this way so hurriedly, Dick?”
asked Sniffkin, beckoning the other aside.

“Why it looks like Deacon Mudgridge's Shadow,” replied
Dick carelessly.

“Deacon Mudgridge's Shadow! who do you mean by that,
sir?”

“Crave your pardon, Mr. Sniffkin, meant no offence; but
some call him so?”

“Call who so?”

“Why, Mr. Dummer, to be sure—Deacon Dummer, perhaps
I should say, as I have heard that he had been advanced
in the church—elected assistant, or supernumerary deacon, or
something of the sort, may be.”

“O, ho—yes; well I at first didn't know but you meant my
uncle, Deacon Mudgridge himself, the strongest pillar of
Church and State in the whole colony, and therefore a man
not to be spoken lightly of by any. But you should be careful
about picking up the nicknames, and cant phrases of vulgar
schismatics and scoffers, even against Dummer, who is a very
zealous and useful man, and is indeed talked of as a fourth
deacon. And I think he will get the place, too, if he does
as well in other things as he has in aiding Deacon Mudgridge
to go through with this important measure on hand to strike
a damper on that audacious King Philip.”

“Glad to hear that of Dummer; for I am with the court
party in this measure, you know, Mr. Sniffkin. And though
I never mean to boast much; yet I think I may say, I have
already done considerable myself towards helping it forward.”

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“Aye, you have done very well Dick, and won the praise
of Deacon Mudgridge, who says you are a fellow of bright
natural parts. But you may have a chance to do much more,
to-day; for this matter must and will be carried through,
notwithstanding all that has been said by that low caitiff, Vane
Willis, whose treasonable words just now I hope you will remember
and report to our rulers, whom he has so shamefully
reviled. But here comes Dummer, and with some word or
message from head quarters, I fancy.”

The subject of this last remark, a lank, long, sanctimonious
looking man, whom, as Dick Swain had inadvertently remarked,
the people, or rather the more independent and outspoken
part of them at least, had playfully dubbed Deacon Mudgridge's
Shadow, on account of his well known subserviency to that
important personage, whom he copied and followed almost as
faithfully as the shadow its substance—now came striding
forward with a countenance working with solemn anxiety.

“What is the news from head quarters, Dummer?” asked
Sniffkin, as he and Dick advanced to meet the former far
enough to be out of earshot of all others—“What is the news
now? Have they got the jury together and everything rightly
fixed there?”

“Mostly,” replied Dummer, “mostly fixed, Mr. Sniffkin;
and they supposed they had quite, and were on the point of
starting for the Meeting House, but”—

“But what? Tell us at once, Dummer.”

“Well, they have concluded to delay a brief time, on account
of some untoward appearances.”

“What appearances? What new thing has turned up now?”

“Nothing very certain, peradventure; but Roger Williams,
that noted old schismatic, who is so prone to side with the
powers of darkness now peculiarly manifest in the doings of the
salvages, those children of Sathana, has arrived this morning

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from Providence, to see that the Indians have fair dealing in
the coming trial, he says.”

“That means, I suppose, that, instigated and hired by that
damned sachem Philip, he has come on to defend and get them
clear.”

“Yea, truly; and it is greatly feared that he has somehow
got speech with some of the five Indians, who, to save all remarks
of the ill-disposed against our fairness, and forever shut
the mouths of the salvages in the same behalf, were, as yourself
doth know, put on the jury with our twelve white jurors.
For, although these five red men were selected with proper
care, and have ever since been kept under righteous influences
till this morning, yet some think they now see in them
tokens of weakness and wavering. Moreover, the Indian witness,
whose report and confessions so providentially led to the
arrest of the murderers of our Christian friend, Sassamon, and
who was ready to swear he saw the murder committed, and
that he could identify the murderers, now seems strangely sullen
and perverse.”

“These things must be seen to immediately; but what does
Deacon Mudgridge think had better be done?”

“Well, he thinks,” replied the other, lowering his voice to
a confidential tone,—“he thinks,—and that was what I came
to see about,—he, I say, thinks that our friend, Dick Swain,
here, might be the right person to see and manage these weak
and doubting Indian jurors, who have been thus induced to
come forward to help the Lord's side. He thinks also, that,
peradventure, they might like their witness fees before hand,
the amount whereof need not be stinted to any exact legal
usage. And yet, furthermore, he thinks they may need
strengthening in bodily firmness. And he has, therefore sent,
by me, these instruments, whereby good may be wrought out,”
added the speaker, drawing out a handful of silver coin with

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one hand, and a bottle of rum with the other, and covertly
passing them to Dick.

And the unserupulous Dick as covertly took possession of
the proffered articles, and with an affirming nod to the Shadow,
and a knowing wink to Sniffkin, silently passed them under
his coat; when the three moved off, with an assumed air of
leisurely indifference, towards the Governor's quarters.

Before introducing the remarkable trial, to which we alluded
as about to take place,—a trial which was destined, as
the fearless and sagacious young marksman we have introduced,
had hypothetically predicted, to be the precursor of the darkest
day ever witnessed by the infant colonies of New England—
before introducing this eventful trial, we should, perhaps,
for the more ready appreciation by the reader of the scenes
next to follow, take a cursory glance at the character and conditions
of the different tribes of New England Indians, together
with the principal historical events, which grew out of
their relations with the whites, and which seem to have been
more immediately connected with the particular crisis we have
undertaken to delineate.

When the Puritan colonists had established themselves
in their different locations in New England, and began to enquire
into the situation, numbers, and distinctive characters, of
the unknown wild people, by whom they were surrounded,
they found within what they esteemed their chartered limits,
three great, distinct, independent tribes, whose numbers and
power seemed to give them a controlling influence in the
country, and to command a sort of tacit submission from all
the various smaller tribes, and fragments of tribes, surviving
the great pestilence, which had evidently, a short period before
the advent of the whites, swept untold thousands of them
into their forest graves. These three tribes were the Pequods,
occupying the valley of Connecticut river, the Narragansetts,
occupying the western part of Rhode Island, and the

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Wampanoogs, or Wampanoags, occupying the eastern part of Rhode
Island, and the southern part of Massachusetts, but exercising
a nominal sway over all the other tribes within the territorial
limits of the Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies. Of
these, the Pequods, a fierce and sanguinary race of warriors,
had, by the rare good fortune of a successful surprise been
broken up, and almost utterly destroyed by the whites, nearly
forty years previous to the time we have chosen for the opening
of our story. This left but two of the only tribes much
to be feared,—the Narragansetts, a numerous but not remarkably
warlike tribe, perhaps, and the Wampanoogs, the most
warlike and proudly independent of them all, to take their
stand against the whites, in case the time should arrive, when
the aggressions of the latter should awaken the jealousies and
hostilities of the former, and induce them to combine and
make a common cause in defence of their rights. And that
time, in spite of all the efforts of the colonial diplomatists of
that day, to dupe and over-awe the Wampanoogs, and keep
them from an alliance with the Narragansetts, had now been
for several years, gradually drawing near. For the first forty
years after the arrival of the Pilgrims in the country, and
while they were weak and consciously in the power of the natives,
they earnestly courted the friendship of the stronger
tribes, especially that of the influential Wampanoogs, and carefully
abstained from all acts of injustice and causes of offence.
And their first treaty with the sincere and noble-hearted Massasoit,
king of that tribe, having been made with earnest and
honorable intent, and carried out in good faith, was preserved
uninfringed during his whole life, constituting a continually
brightening chain of friendship between the contracting parties,
and beautifully exemplifying the important truth subsequently
confirmed and demonstrated by the pure and wise William
Penn, that when the whites act sincerely and in no way become
the aggressors, there is no difficulty in living in peace

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and amity with the Indians. But, at length, the good old
Massasoit passed away, leaving the succession to his two sons
Wamsutta and Metacom, both young men alike, ennobled by
birth and elevation of character, and well-fitted to sustain the
dignity of their father's throne. These young men, during
the halcyon period of faith, honesty, and peace, that preceded
the death of Massasoit, had mingled freely with the colonists,
visited the court of Plymouth, received from the Governor the
complimentary names of Alexander and Philip,—were courted
on account of their high position, respected for their manly
deportment and unusual personal endowments, and afforded
facilities for information, which were rare with the natives,
and which, when improved as they had improved them, at
length made these princely brothers, doubtless the two most
intelligent, as well as naturally talented young red men then
to be found on the American continent. And there is no reason
to believe that, had they and their people continued to
experience the same respect and good treatment they had all
received during the life time of Massasoit, the chain of their
mutual friendship would never have been made dim by hostile
blood. But a change had been gradually coming over the
colonists. They had become comparatively strong and powerful,
and with the increase of their strength and power, their
deference to the red men and disposition to treat them as
equals, either in trade or treaty, seemed strangely to undergo
a proportionate decrease. All this Alexander and Philip were
not slow to perceive, and it soon so far operated on them as to
keep them aloof from the court of Plymouth. And it was the
insulting and arbitrary attempt to compel their attendance and
required subserviency, which so mysteriously resulted in the
untimely death of Alexander, who, being the eldest, had succeeded
to the throne, and preluded that series of wrongs and indignities
on his successor, Philip, that finally led to the bloody
drama which is the ground-work of our eventful story.

p719-030 CHAPTER II.

“The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye, the more you pour
light upon it, the more it contracts.”

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After a long and anxious suspense, the company around
the Meeting-House were again aroused by the renewed ringing
of the bell and the beating of the distant drum, this time pealing
out and rattling so loud and intermittingly, that all felt there
was now little danger of another disappointment. And in a few
minutes, as they had anticipated, the head of the procession
consisting of the embodiment of Church and State, with
their proposed Indian victims, jurors, witnesses, and others,
hove in sight. Preceded by the Sheriff on a black horse,
and a drummer and fife, came the Governor and his Secretary,
walking side by side, next his assistants, who were to act as
civil magistrates, and then the minister and elder of the Church,
who were to make up the Ecclesiastic part of the court, formed
after the fashion of the times for the trial of all important cases.
And next to these came the jurors and witnesses headed by a
constable, and then the three Indian prisoners, in their scanty
native garbs, dejectedly, but firmly walking in Indian file, and
enclosed before, behind, and on each side, in the hollow square
of their well armed military guard. Immediately after these
last, came waddling along, with an air of mingled meekness and
wisdom, the thick-set, mealy, rough-visaged, and pig-eyed
Deacon Mudgridge, the important personage, who has already
been once or twice alluded to, and who was the volunteer manager
of the forth-coming trial, on the part of the prosecution.
By his side strode the long, never failing Shadow, who, as the

[figure description] Page 026.[end figure description]

minister was to sit on the trial, had been, on account of his gifts
for prayer and impromptu, selected as a sort of Chaplain on
the occasion. And last of all, followed a long line of citizens,
summoned into the ranks, to swell the retinue and give it the
most imposing effect.

This was a political or state trial, or at least made such by
its assumed connection with the public question, by which
the community, as before stated, were, at this time, peculiarly
agitated, and it was expected by all, therefore, that it would
be conducted with considerable ceremony. But the authorities,
not content with the usual ceremonies of such occasions,
had been at very extraordinary pains to have all the proceedings
of this trial marked throughout with unusual parade and
great show of stern solemnity; for one of the principal objects
they had in view, in instituting the measure, was to strike a
dread upon the natives, and overawe their proud chief, the
feared and hated Metacom of Montaup.* The whole affair
therefore, from the first—the marching of the procession,
the entrance into the Meeting House, the place appointed
for the trial, as the one most likely to be attended by Indian
spectators, and the seating of the authorities, with all others,
had been conducted with all possible pomp, and was thus
made to resemble, in appearance, some military trial and
execution, rather than the quiet proceedings of a court of
justice, exercising only the functions of civil authority. And
thus nearly an hour was spent in the march of an hundred
rods, and in arranging matters for the opening of the court.
At length, however, all this had been accomplished, to the
apparent satisfaction of those in control, every thing had become
settled down into quiet in the Meeting House, and the
anxious audience sat with keenly expectant looks, awaiting
the commencement of the important business of the day.

[figure description] Page 027.[end figure description]

At this juncture, the attention of the audience was attracted
by the quiet entrance of an elderly gentleman, whose
unobtrusive, yet firm and free deportment, intelligent look,
and native dignity of manner, seemed at once to impress all
classes of the mingled assemblage, as their enquiring gaze
was turned towards him, with the involuntary feeling that
they were favored with the presence of more than an ordinary
man. Notwithstanding the snows of the seventy winters that
had thickly powdered his high and noble head, and converted
his once raven locks into the silver wreath that now entwined
itself around his thin, rectilinear features and strikingly
intellectual countenance, his step was firm and elastic; and
little or nothing could be detected in his general appearance
indicating any abatement of physical vigor. With a composed,
self-possessed air, and an occasional quick, sharp
glance around him, he advanced directly towards the platform
on which the civil and church dignitaries had become seated,
with the jury, prisoners, guards, and officers arranged below
and along in front of them. Though evidently a stranger to
most of the audience, he yet seemed soon to be recognized,
and that, too, with manifestations of displeasure, by several
of the older part of the assembly; and quickly the name and
epithets, Old Roger Williams! Williams, the banished
heretic! and the half Quaker, half infidel Roger Williams!
was audibly whispered and buzzed from mouth to mouth,
among the now continuing crowd. But without appearing to
hear or notice these irreverent and unfriendly demonstrations,
he proceeded deliberately along the aisle, until he reached the
further end of the bench on which the Indian prisoners were
seated, where he paused, and made some slight motion to
attract their attention. They looked up, and while the
twinkle of a smile lighted up, for the instant, their gloomy,
saturnine visages, they simultaneously uttered a low, guttural
exclamation of gratified feeling.

[figure description] Page 028.[end figure description]

Williams, for the stranger was indeed no other than the
persecuted and banished man, who was thereafter to become
known as the first great champion of religious liberty in
America, and who had now volunteered to come from his new
home and freshly planted colony at Providence, to defend
those from whose hospitable tribe he had once received protection
and friendship. Williams then turned, firmly confronted
the court, and stood silent, as if waiting to hear what
they might have to say at his appearance before them.

“What may be your desire, sir?” at length, coldly asked
the stern and severe looking Governor Winslow, affecting to
have forgotten the other, or being unwilling to speak his
name. “Have you some favor to crave at the hands of the
court?”

“Nay, your Excellency,” replied Williams, in a deep, firm,
and musical voice. “Nay, not a favor; yet I deemed it but
proper, with a fitting opportunity of speech, to apprise the
court that I appear here before them as the friend and
counsel of these prisoners; not to defeat the ends of justice,
but only to guard against its perversion to the detriment of
their rights, as well as of the safety and good name of your
colony.”

A frown was seen instantly to gather on the warty visage
of Deacon Mudgridge, at the remarks, and a fidgety movement
seemed to agitate the whole of his fat, dumpy person, as,
alternately glancing at the speaker and the court, he did his
best to look his aversion to the man, and his objections to the
part he had proposed to act in the trial.

“Do you wish,” resumed the governor, after a hesitating
pause, “do you wish me, sir, to put it to vote with the
court, whether you shall be admitted as counsel of the
prisoners?”

“Nay; again I have to say, nay, your Excellency,”
calmly responded the other. “The constitution and laws of

[figure description] Page 029.[end figure description]

England, and of this colony, of course, have always guaranteed,
even to the worst of criminals, the right of being heard
by counsel, and I will not so far question the intelligence and
impartiality of this court, as to intimate any necessity of
asking such a thing of them. I only wait for the trial to proceed.”

After a short, whispered consultation among the grave
personages of the court, which seemed to result in some perplexity
and difference of opinion, respecting the admission of
Williams to act in the capacity claimed by him, the governor,
as the presiding judge, with much the air of one who finds
himself compelled to tolerate some nuisance which he lacks
the power to abate, at last turned to Deacon Mudgridge, and
suggested that, on the whole, it were better perhaps to let the
matter pass as it was, and proceed with the trial.

The Shadow, or Dummer, the deacon candidate, being then
called on for the purpose, made a long, loud and zealous
prayer, beginning with the fall of Adam, following the history
of the Church to the time when God's chosen Israel, in the
persons of the Plymouth colonists, began to antagonize with
the accursed Canaanites of the American forests, and ending
with praying every heathen savage out of the land, and King
Philip to an especial perdition.

When this introductory performance was at length brought
to a close, and the audience became composed, Deacon Mudgridge
slowly rose from the conspicuous seat he had taken on
the right, but a little in front of the court, and, with an air
of exceeding solemnity, and a countenance big with the conscious
importance of the trust devolving on him in the double
capacity of chosen captain of the church militant of the
colony, and the champion of its civil authority, began, by way
of a preliminary speech for suitably impressing the court, jury,
and all others with the right frame of mind before entering
on their duties, to dilate on the very great importance of the

[figure description] Page 030.[end figure description]

case which had now come up for the solemn and prayerful
consideration of the court and jury. This trial would involve,
he believed, a most momentous crisis to God's favored people,
whom he had planted with his own right hand in this wilderness
country, wherein to erect his tabernacles, convert or
drive out the idolatrous heathen, and make it a vineyard for
his elected heritage. And he could not forbear, he said, to
warn the court and jury, in advance, against the great danger
of falling into the fatal error of Saul, and also that of Achan,
the weak follower of Joshua, who brought sore judgments on
Israel by sparing some of the enemy, and being seduced by
the love of spoils, (to which our desire to gain the traffic of
the Indians might be likened,) and so fear to take decided
steps against the heathen prisoners; when the righteous
example of Samuel, who hewed the wicked Agag to pieces,
and moreover that of Joshua, who ordered the stoning to
death of the disobedient Achan—when these wholesome examples
were still standing as beacon lights, whereby to avoid
incurring the guilt of any like offences.

He then read the indictment, setting forth, in substance,
that the prisoners, one Tobias, a leading man of the Wampanoogs,
and called by them Poggapanosso, one Wampaquan,
son of said Tobias, and one other Indian, instigated by the
devil and King Philip, did, on a certain day of March preceding,
waylay, murder, and conceal in a hole cut through the
ice on the great pond bordering said King Philip's territory,
one John Sassamon, a praying Indian, with malice prepense,
and to the great displeasure of Heaven.

The deacon next read over his list of witnesses, whom he
divided into two classes: one to show what he termed the
necessary circumstantial matters bearing on the case, and the
other to give direct evidence of the murder. The first class
consisted of the more intimate white acquaintances of Sassamon,
and the last of two Indians, Dick Swain, and the zealot,

[figure description] Page 031.[end figure description]

Dummer. The witnesses embraced in the first division being
then brought on to the stand and sworn, proceeded to give in
their testimony, the aggregate amount of which was that the
deceased Sassamon, formerly a Wampanoog, had been reclaimed,
in the first place, from the devilish influences of his
idolatrous tribe, became a praying Indian, and afterwards
showed himself so apt at learning as soon to be able to read
and write quite readily. But, after living several years with
the whites, and receiving many favors from them, he suddenly
disappeared, and was next heard of among his tribe, by whom
he was again taken into full fellowship, and among whom he
turned his knowledge and cunning to so good an account, that
he soon was promoted to the post of confidential secretary to
King Philip. This place he held many years, and until he
appeared to have completely gained the confidence of Philip
and his councillors; when, having committed some crime
which by their laws was punishable with death, he fled for his
life, and came back once more among his old white Christian
brethren, who, moved by his loud lamentations for his late
apostasy, and his earnest professions of renewed religious
experiences, again received him into favor, and sent him to
teach and preach among the praying Indians of Middleboro'.
But, not content here with the exercise of his new calling,
nor with the peaceable occupation of the land and house which
his white friends had purchased for him, he at once began to
play the spy on the movements of his old master, King
Philip, when he soon appeared to become so burdened with
the discoveries he pretended to have made of that chief's
secret designs against the colonists, that he could rest no
longer. He therefore repaired to Plymouth, sought a private
interview with the governor, and, under the injunction of the
strictest secrecy, made the startling disclosure that King Philip
was actively preparing for a war of extermination against the
colony—a fact which he pretended to have at first learned

[figure description] Page 032.[end figure description]

when he was the chief's secretary, and which was fully confirmed
by his recent discoveries. Having made these revelations,
he again earnestly besought the governor not to let his
secret go beyond himself and council; for should a knowledge
of the disclosure reach the ears of Metacom, his life would be
sure to pay the forfeit. But it was not to be supposed that so
alarming a secret could long be confined to the court. It
soon passed from the governor and his consulting friends, and
spread, with the rapidity of the wind, over the whole colony,
and in a few weeks the luckless Sassamon was suddenly
missing.

This part of the testimony having been at length brought
to a close, the other class of witnesses, relied on for the
direct testimony, were then called on to the stand. And the
Indian who went by the name of David, among the whites,
and who was announced by Deacon Mudgridge, as “the faithful
Christian friend of the late lamented Sassamon, and the
first discoverer of this hell-invented murder,” was now directed
to stand forward and relate the particulars of what
was understood to be his story about the affair. Accordingly
David, a small, demure, peaceful looking Indian, then moved
himself along a little, and quietly proceeded:

“Find Sassamon gone, one day, and no come back. Much
'fraid him must be killed; so go look all round in the woods;
but no find him nowhere. Then go on Assawompset, big
pond. Little way, see hat on the ice. Go there, find him
Sassamon hat. See hole in the ice, get pole, feel him soon,
and bring him up, pull him out, find where club strike him
head. Then go fetch white men, tell 'em Sassamon killed.
They no believe, say him drown himself, and carry him off
and bury him. Then me go and tell governor Sassamon
killed, sartin. Governor look like believe some, order Sassamon
dig up. Me there, show them, more time again, where
club strike Sassamon head. They believe this time, think

[figure description] Page 033.[end figure description]

Indian tell right, and say Philip men did it, sartin, 'cause
Sassamon break Indian law. Me know Sassamon 'fraid him
be killed, long time. But me no tell, me no know who did
it, 'cause me no see it. Can't tell lie—that make him bad
Indian. Good book say God roast um liars.”

All present being convinced that David had testified honestly,
no questions were asked him on either side; and Patuckson,
the other Indian witness, who was the only person
pretending to have seen the deed committed, was then called
on to testify. He was evidently an Indian of a very different
character from that of David, being bolder, more forward, and
exhibiting, both in countenance and manner, many indications
of cunning and calculation. He commenced like one
ready for his part, and glibly went on—

“Hoh! me know all about Tobias and this two tother Indian
kill Sassamon. Me go among Indians self, and find out.
Metacom come home from long journey, hear how Sassamon
been spying round there, and then hear how he tell governor
bad story. He no like it, and tell him warrior Sassamon
traitor, dog-spy; come round there to carry lie to white men.
Metacom much mad, say him sorry Sassamon not killed for
that tother thing, 'fore him run away; and so he call meeting
of old men, at Montaup. Meeting all say Sassamon die this
time; catch him, kill him. Tobias there, talk loud, say all
good Indian watch him, kill him always. Me go off, watch
too, for see what done. So, one day on hill near big pond,
see Sassamon go across ice, and three Indians coming. Hide
and soon see Tobias and this two tother Indian run fast, catch
Sassamon, strike club hard, kill him; then cut hole in ice,
put him in, then run away quick. Me no tell then; but
when white men dig up Sassamon me tell all; show 'em
where Tobias and this two tother Indian had camp, catch fish
on tother end great pond; so they go, catch 'em all.”

Deacon Mudgridge then, with the view of placing the

[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]

testimony of the witness in the strongest light possible, asked
sundry leading questions, which were so worded as to elicit
positive assertions of what were before left as matters of inference,
and which were answered as he had anticipated and
wished; the court taking no notice of this violation of the
rules of conducting an examination, and no objection to the
course being interposed by Williams, who, from some policy
of his own, kept silence. The latter, however, evidently distrusted
the truth and honesty of the witness, and resolved on
subjecting him to a close cross-examination. And in this he
was soon to be materially aided from an unexpected quarter.
Vane Willis, who knew something of the witness, and was
perfectly familiar with the localities of the murder, now
worked himself along through the crowd, took a seat directly
behind Williams, and whispered to him a few suggestions, of
which he might take advantage.

“You say, sir,” carelessly commenced Williams, addressing
the witness, of whom, he told the court, he would ask a
few questions by way of his privileged cross-examination—
“You say you saw Tobias coming over the ice, and I suppose
Tobias saw you, at the same time, didn't he?”

“Can't no tell,” replied the witness, looking inquiringly to
Deacon Mudgridge, who, suspecting the question was put to
bring out an affirmative answer, which was to be used as some
trap, soon succeeded by his looks and motions in making the
former understand that he must answer in the negative.

“Can't you tell? don't you know he saw you?” again
asked Williams rather sternly.

“No; me don't know that—me think he no see me—me
know he no see me at all,” answered the witness, fast growing
confident.

“How,” persisted the former—“how do you know but
what Tobias saw you?”

“Know Tobias no see me,” now positively affirmed the

[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]

latter, impatiently; “me know him couldn't, 'cause me hid a
great way off on the hill.”

“Oh, not a great way I suspect,” returned Williams. “But
really, how far was it?”

“Can't tell,” replied the witness; “but great way—as far
as here to where governor house be.”

“That, to be sure, is over a quarter of a mile,” said the
questioner. “But then Tobias and the others when you saw
them were sometimes close to the shore, were they not?”

“No!” exclaimed the witness, “him great way out on the
pond—more further from the shore than me back on the
hill.”

“That,” now remarked Williams, glancing at the court,
“would make the distance from the witness to the nearest point
at which he swears he saw the prisoner under examination,
over half a mile, and, as he says Sassamon ran some distance
before he was overtaken, the distance to the spot where the
deed was alleged to have been done, could not have been less
than three quarters of a mile. And yet he positively swears
not only to the commission of the murder but to the identity
of the perpetrator! Enough of such a witness as that! I
have done with him.”

For the first time, both the witness and the prompting
Deacon now saw the object of Williams' well managed maneuver
to draw from the former the admission of the truth that
he was at too great a distance from the scene to be able to
swear safely to any thing. And the Deacon, seeing at once
that it would not do to leave the testimony in this shape,
leaped up and vehemently protested against the use of the
cunning arts and devices of the godless lawyers of the secular
and unsanctified courts, which his opponent had probably
learned in the old world, where he learned his other heresies,
and which he had now brought here, and put in practice to
confuse and lead astray a simple minded native, and a truthful,

[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]

honest witness as there was in the world. And then turning
to the witness, he sternly demanded of him, if he did not mean
to swear positively that he clearly saw the murder committed,
and that he knew it was Tobias, and the other prisoners, who
did it.'

“Ya-ya-yas—me know—me swear,” responded the witness,
at first hesitating, but soon evidently becoming alarmed for his
own personal interests from what he read in the looks of the
Deacon—“yas, me swear—me swear hard—me swear two
times, again! There! guess me get pay now, sartin.”

“Pay?” exclaimed Williams significantly. “Then he was
to be paid for swearing in a particular manner, and to have
no pay without so doing, was he? The court and jury will
please remember this.”

“Wo unto him that perverteth testimony!” cried the visibly
disturbed Deacon in what he intended should pass for a scriptural
denunciation of his opponent. “But, peradventure, it is
no wonder that one who deserted the true church for damnable
heresies should resort to such means to shield the heathen,
with whom he has so long consorted. No doubt he hopes to
make out the identity of the prisoners to be a doubtful matter.
But he will not prevail. The expectation of the wicked
shall perish. I will now introduce evidence, which, coming,
as I may say it does, directly from the ordering of Providence
for the detection of the guilty, he will hardly dare to impeach.
Brother Dummer, will you step forward and state what you
saw, with your own eyes, at the time Sassamon's body was
exhumed for examination, and the prisoner, Tobias, was
brought in to undergo the test then and there prescribed for
him?”

“I did verily,” said the Shadow, throwing his eyes around
and upward with an air of peculiar reverence and solemnity—
“I did verily witness, on that solemn occasion, a very great
marvel, touching the matter whereof I am now called to testify.

[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]

And I do affirm and say, that, when this child of Sathan, the
prisoner Tobias here, was brought in where the dead body lay,
to undergo the ordeal of confronting and touching it with his
bare hand, he was forthwith smitten with the fear and trembling
of conscious guilt, and could hardly be got near the
body, much less be persuaded to touch any part of it. Whereupon,
the young man, Richard Swain, then and there also
present, being moved thereto with the rest of us, but more
prompt unto the duty of seeing the ordeal perfected, speedily
seized the forefinger of the prisoner, and thrust it on to the
naked body; when, lo! the mysterious and God-ordered result!
Fresh blood, which had started out at the touch of the guilty
member, was plainly seen standing on the place of contact!”*

The now exulting Deacon next called Dick Swain, but, at
the same time, remarked that he wished merely to ask him
whether he agreed with the last witness and could confirm his
statement.

“O, yes, be sure; I saw the same blood he did,” somewhat
hurriedly responded Dick, rising, but manifesting no inclination
to go into particulars.

“Very well, that is all,” said the Deacon motioning the
other back to his seat.

“Not quite all,” interposed Williams, again acting on the
whispered suggestions of the shrewd prompter behind him.
“Were you sent by any one to be present at the examination
in question?”

“Sent?—no, not in particular, as I know of,” answered
Dick, glancing around doubtfully.

“Well, sir, did you not go wholly for the purpose of witnessing
the examination?”

“I may say not—that is, not wholly so; but hearing about
it, and feeling some curiosity about the matter, I thought I

[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]

would skirt the woods along in that direction, with my gun,
on the look-out for game, and stop there to see what was
going on.”

“Did you kill anything?”

“No, nothing of any account; merely one gray squirrel.”

“Did you kill the squirrel with shot, or with a bullet?”

“With a bullet. I generally go into the woods with my
gun loaded with a bullet, these days, as there are murderous
Indians about.”

“Yes, but what part of the squirrel did the bullet strike?”

“Well, it went right through his throat, seeing you are so
particular to know.”

“It was a long time, wasn't it, after you shot the animal
before you reached the place where they were examining the
body?”

“No it wasn't any such thing, sir,” replied Dick, with an
air that seemed to say, `you can't catch me in it that way.'
“It wasn't twenty minutes.”

“Oh, well, but you had the squirrel in your hand when you
took hold of the prisoner's finger and thrust it upon the dead
body?”

“No, sir, I did not; I know I did not, for I had just
hurled the animal into the corner of the room where I had
set up my gun.”

“Well, you said you saw the blood on the spot which was
touched by the prisoner's finger?”

“Yes, I did, and will still swear to it. I saw it as soon as
his hand was taken away, same as all the rest did. I know
there was blood there.”

“I don't dispute at all, that a bloody mark then became
visible there; but,” continued the speaker, suddenly turning
a stern gaze upon the face of the quailing witness, while he
raised his voice to a pitch of startling loudness, “but, Richard
Swain, tell me, before God, who put that blood there? Who,

[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]

sir, while his right hand was bearing the reluctant finger of
the prisoner to the dead body? Who drew the fingers of his
left hand, first purposely made bloody in the fresh wound of
his game, slyly over the spot of the coming contact? Ay, sir,
who put that blood there with the sole object of making
evidence against this poor Indian prisoner?”

“Blasphemy! rank blasphemy!” cried the enraged
Deacon. “He is trying to turn the miraculous intervention
of God for the detecting of an awful crime into mockery!
Are the sanctified Elders of the Church of Christ, who have
vowed to guard his authority against reproach, and our civil
rulers who bear not the sword in vain, to sit here and listen
to all this? For one, I do protest against such doings. The
witness swore distinctly to the seeing the blood follow in consequence
of the touch. So did brother Dummer, whose word
none can question. This is enough; and I do most earnestly
object to this, or any other witness answering such entangling,
hell-devised questions, put to defeat the ends of heaven's own
justice. Yea, as I said, the evidence is abundantly enough
to ensure a conviction; but lest my opponent should claim
anything savoring doubt, or the weakening of the testimony
of the last witness by means of his ungodly arts, I will call
others who were present on that remarkable occasion of the
visible doings of Providence, and see what they will say.”

So saying, the Deacon, to prevent Williams from pressing
his last questions further on the discomfited Dick, hurriedly
called on two more witnesses of the Dummer stamp, who, as
might be expected, unhesitatingly swore to the same thing;
when, with an air of defiant exultation, he announced to the
court that he was through with the testimony, and that the
case was ready for argument.

There was now by common, tacit consent, a short pause in
the proceedings, which was made use of by the assembly, as
usual among congregated bodies after a tedious sitting, in

[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]

shifting positions, rising and moving from one place to another,
or passing in and out the house. This naturally produced sufficient
bustle and confusion to afford the active friends of the
prosecution an opportunity for wire pulling, which they were
not slow to improve. The Deacon was seen conversing earnestly
with the different members of the court, whom he successively
beckoned aside for the purpose. The Shadow evidently
had considerable business along the seats occupied by
the white jurymen; while Dick Swain, on pretense of hunting
for some lost article, might have been seen hustling about
among the Indian jurors, and slyly passing something much
resembling small bottles under their blankets. The audience
however soon settled down into their former quietness
and listening attitudes; when the Governor intimated to
the Deacon, that he was now expected to commence the opening
argument.

“Man is weak, and full of short-comings. Strength and
wisdom are of the Lord. Let us invoke the Divine blessing,”
said the Deacon, suddenly throwing up his hands, and entering,
with peculiar unction, upon a prayer especially devised for the
occasion. After concluding his prayer, or rather his set of instructions
to the Almighty how to influence the mind of the court
and jury, and how to order the result of their deliberations, all
disguised in the form of prayer, he cleared his throat anew, and
commenced his great and long studied effort. But having already
given several specimens of his mode of treating the
case in hand, on religious grounds—a mode which appears to
have been fully sanctioned in the colonial courts of the day, we
will not follow him through his long, tedious, Scriptural argument,
but only take notice of his speech, when he got round,
as he at length did, to the alleged origin of the difficulties
between the Indians and the favored people, who had been
sent to this land, as he affirmed, to possess and improve it as
their Heaven-bestowed heritage.

[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]

“These heathen salvages,” he then went on to say, “after
their lives had been mercifully spared—against the will of
Heaven, I greatly fear—at length became perverse and stubborn,
utterly refusing to hearken to the Gospel truths and beginning
to harbor evil designs against our chosen people.
This evil-minded, and rebellious spirit was first especially
made manifest in that untoward Sachem, called Alexander,
who, as his excellency here, then an actor in the affair, can
bear witness, was signally chastised, and in a manner unmistakably
showing the displeasure of Heaven at his perverse and
wicked conduct. But Philip, the subtle and treacherous Sachem
who succeeded him, instead of being warned by the rebuke
he might have read in the fate of his brother, soon became
guilty of still more untoward and heinous conduct.
Encouraged in his audacious courses by our mistaken forbearance,
doubt-less he hath gone on from year to year, in open
violation of his solemn treaties, multiplying his offenses, by
stirring up his tribe of Sathanic malignants to hostility against
us, plotting with other tribes to join him, in his deeply meditated
onslaught on the colony, and lastly by instigating the
foul murder, now under investigation. And thus hath he
careered it in his wickedness, until he hath at length reached
that pitch of devilish doing and intent, wherein all have been
brought to see that the public peace and safety loudly demand
that he should receive a chastisement at our hands,
which shall at once put a stop to his wicked and dangerous
career, and serve as a lesson to all his heathen followers.
Hence the present prosecution, and hence, also, the imperious
necessity of a result, whereby such check and such lesson may
be publicly given. And such result, since the guilt of prisoners
stands clearly proved and established by the most indubitable
testimony, in spite of all attempted perversions thereof by
heretical sympathizers—such result, I say, I now, in the

[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]

performance of my God-bounden duty, confidently urge and demand
at the hands of this court and jury.”

Having thus delivered himself, the heated Deacon dropped
puffing and panting into his seat; when Williams, heeding
neither the sneering whispers of the crowd, nor the cold and
frowning looks of the court, calmly rose and entered on his
speech for the defense.

“I do not deem it either meet or necessary,” he said, “for
me to follow the opposing speaker through that part of his
discourse pertaining to the duties and mission of the church,
which, he says, God has planted here to become his special
heritage, and to act as his commissioned instruments in
driving out the unbelieving heathen, or reduce them to
obedience and belief in its behests and doctrines. I devoutly
hope the church here is of God's planting, and that its
waterings may be such as not only to bring it increase, but
give it the light and grace to permit all, whether white or
red, to believe and worship in accordance with the dictates of
conscience, and not make the exercise of their rightful soulliberty,
a matter of accusation against them. But with all
this I have nothing to do, and shall only begin on that part
of his argument grounded on the alleged offenses of the red
men, which first manifested themselves, he asserts, in the
conduct of that hapless young chief, Alexander, (about whose
fate it would have been better wisdom to have said nothing,)
and to have been continually kept up by his successor, Philip,
to the present time, in all sorts of misdemeanors and crimes, the
last of which was the instigation of the alleged murder now
under consideration. The existence of continued dissensions
between the red men and the colonists, I fully admit; but as
fully deny that the causes assigned for these dissensions are
the true ones, or that they have any special bearing on this
case. Of the origin and continuance of our difficulties with
the Indians, my opponent has drawn one picture in colors

[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]

wrought up from rumor, suspicion, and prejudice. I will
draw another by the lights of certain knowledge, and in the
spirit of even handed justice.

“Nearly forty years ago, a youngerly man, banished from
his home in the neighboring colony for his advocacy of religious
liberty, and becoming thereby a houseless, hunted outcast,
who had not where to lay his head, nor wherewith to
sustain life, at length found his only refuge among the children
of the forest, and was especially taken in hand by the
very tribe of whom we have just heard such sweeping denunciations.
Here, finding a home and a welcome, the more
cordially proffered for the very reasons which made him an
exile, he studied the ways and characters of the red men,
noted their virtues, and learned to make allowance for their
errors. Being then in the family of the peaceful and honest
old Massasoit, he could not but regard with interest the heirs
apparent to this powerful Sachemdom, the old chief's two
sons, Alexander and Philip, who have been branded in this
presence as the great instigators of all the offenses of that
branded tribe. They were then in the flower of their young
manhood, and the exile thought them, as he looked upon their
goodly persons, and noted their manly conduct and surprising
intelligence, two young men of whom any monarch might
well be proud, as successors to his throne.

“After a while, the exile made himself a new home, but
maintained his relations and intercourse with these young
chiefs, and was cognizant of all the events subsequently happening
to each—of their movements and motives—of the
accession of Alexander to the throne, and of his prompt
repairing, with his brother Philip, to the court of Plymouth
to declare their wish and intention to maintain inviolate the
treaty of their father with the whites—of his then resting in
entire confidence of their faith and fair dealing—of his deep
surprise in being summoned to Plymouth to answer charges

[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]

of meditating a violation of the treaty, confessedly founded on
mere rumor, and of his still greater surprise at being soon
after seized in his peaceful employments by a band of armed
white men, and marched off a prisoner for trial, like some
felon subject, instead of the independent sovereign their own
treaty had acknowledged him. The exile also speedily
became apprised of the young chief's strangely befalling sickness,
while under arrest, and of his delivery to his friends on
pledge for his return, if he recovered, that his degradation
might be completed.

“Yes, the exile learned this, and with lively concern was
hastening to the scene to avert the anticipated consequences
of the outrage, when he met the weeping train, just landing
from the river with their sick and dying chief. Here he
stood by with deeply moved feelings, and silently witnessed the
mournful scene. From minute to minute he noted the slower
and slower heaving bosom, and the feebler and feebler groans
of the departing sufferer, that rose low murmuring on the
hushed wilderness, till his unstained spirit escaped to a land
where persecution ceases, and love and forgiveness, with conscious
rectitude of purpose, makes heaven for the red man as
well as the white. The exile noted all this, and then the
brief, awful silence that followed, the wild frenzied wail of
anguish that the next moment burst from the convulsed lips
of the bereaved young queen, the dark, but comely Wetamoo,
then the low, ominous muttering of the old men, as they
thought of the authors of this, their great sorrow and calamity,
and then the fierce outcries of the up-leaping young warriors
demanding to be led on to avenge the death of their
idolized chieftain.

“And why were they not led on to execute their fearful
purpose? They had good cause of war, and, as they believed,
of a war of bloody, terrible retribution; for the Indians, who
are the most unerring guessers of any class of people I have

[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]

ever met with in the old world or new, then fully believed,
and have ever since believed, that Alexander came to his
death by the foul hand of the white poisoner!”

“Damnable falsehood! libel! treason! yea, rank treason!”
shouted the here interrupting deacon, leaping to his feet, with
a countenance blazing with holy wrath and indignation.
“Was it not Major Josiah Winslow, who, in pursuance of
bounden duty, bravely captured and brought home that vile
Sachem, Alexander? And was it not at his own house that
the captured wretch was seized with the fever, brought on by
his heathen ragings? And, moreover, was not that duty-doing
Major Winslow the same person who is now here presiding as
our honored governor?”

“The gentleman forgets that I, myself, made no accusation
against any body,” resumed Williams, taking advantage of
the first pause in the deacon's furious outburst. “I was
merely naming the belief of the Indians respecting the cause
of their chief's singular death. They did so believe, and
repeated their conviction, in despite the rebuking words of the
exile, who told them, as has just been intimated, that he must
have died of the fever of passion, or grief and chagrin, though
his suggestions met no other response than fiercely shaking
heads, and the impatient question, `Did ever Indian catch
fever and die of that complaint before?'

“But I willingly pass over that page of our history, which I
only wish we had never been compelled to place there; for I
gladly, Oh! gladly,

`Would tear that leaf—would blot it with a tear.'

[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]

with whom they were in treaty, would not instantly pronounce
it a war-warranting outrage? Not one. Yes, there was cause
of war; and, as I before asked, why did not war follow? I
will now tell you why. The exile—yea, the despised exile
and outcast—earnestly interceded for his old white persecutors;
and Philip, the still more despised and hated Philip, then becoming
king, soon joined him in appeasing the wrath of the
red men. Such, at that dangerous crisis, was the course taken
by the forbearing Metacom, who then, as afterwards, honestly
tried to avoid war, the consequences of which, to both sides,
his far-reaching sagacity has ever fully appreciated. And he
not only quelled the hostile feelings of his followers, but soon
personally notified the court of Plymouth of the wish, on his
part, of still maintaining the treaty of his father, and of his
brother, notwithstanding his own deep sense of injury at what
had transpired.

“After this notification, Philip supposed, as his luckless brother
had done, that this was sufficient, without paying attendance,
like a vassal, at the court of Plymouth. But, like his
brother, he was mistaken about the double requirement of
that court, that would have him an independent sovereign
long enough to bind himself in treaty, and all the rest of the
time become the frequent homage-paying courtier, so that he
could be kept in subjection. Though not at first understanding
this, yet he was soon made to know it. In a short time,
he, too, was summoned to Plymouth on charges founded on
suspicion, or the false representations of the runagate Indians
whom they had tempted by rewards for such communications.
He concluded, however, to heed the arrogant summons, for by
this time he had many just complaints of his own to make
known against the whites, for their inroads on his lands, and
for defrauding his people. But, warned by the fate of his
brother, he went with an armed escort, and held parley with
the court in the open air, but was, notwithstanding, entrapped

[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

into the signing of a new treaty, which entirely passed over
his own grievances, they being no part of the object of the
astute framers, and by which he was unwittingly made to
acknowledge offenses never committed, and, as a punishment
therefor, to promise to deliver up the arms of his tribe to the
court. Nor was this all. At the very hour when he was
being detained by this one-sided and fraudulent negotiation,
the men of Plymouth were secretly mustering an armed force
to overpower his attendants, and seize him as a prisoner; and
they were only prevented from the execution of their design
by the remonstrances of the more conscientious pacificators,
then present from the sister colony. And this was but the
beginning of the indignities he was doomed to suffer. Within
a short period, he was again summoned to appear before the
court of Plymouth, under threat of war, for the violation of
the last so claimed treaty, that he had not been permitted but
partially to understand, the charge this time being that he had
not delivered up the guns of his people, which they depended
on for their daily subsistence, and which he had no power to
compel them to surrender; and being still anxious to avoid
war, he consented to another conference, and met the court
again, but with a force of warriors sufficient for his personal
protection, well understanding the disgraceful plan which had
been started for capturing him at the previous meeting. But
the presence of warriors is but a poor shield against the
over-reaching of designing treaty-makers; and this time, another
of those extraordinary documents was drawn up for the
occasion, by which Philip was made not only to consent to be
heavily fined for his alleged disobedience, but relinquish his
sovereignty, and submit himself and his people to the government
of the colony! And the whole gist of all the complaints
since made against him, have been, not that he has committed
any acts of hostility, but that he has been suspected of meditating
them, and of making preparations for defending himself

[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]

and people, in disregard of those one-sided, fraudulent, and
therefore void compacts, which, as if in insulting mockery,
are now claimed as solemn and mutually ratified treaties!

“Such is that other picture, which I proposed to draw, to
contrast with the one drawn by my opponent, and the exile I
have named as furnishing the materials is here, in the person
of him now speaking, to vouch for its truth and accuracy.

“Now, admitting that Philip, in view of the wrongs and indignities
that have been heaped upon him and his hapless
predecessor, together with the well-warranted belief that they
were but the first steps of a policy to be pursued till he and
his nation should be entirely subjugated; admitting he has
been making military preparations, and courting alliances with
other tribes, for maintaining his sovereignty and defending
his people, does that very natural precaution place him in the
wrong? Had he not a perfect right to do all this? Would
not you, if a colony of strangers, with habits and notions repugnant
to your own, should plant themselves near you, begin
to aggress on your rights, and manifest a disposition to reduce
you to subjection—would not you do it yourselves? You
know you would. Then ponder it, ye rulers of Plymouth, who
profess to be governed by the golden rule of doing as you
would be done by, ponder it well before you further denounce
Metacom of Montaup for what he may have done, or rather
what he has been suspected of doing, and pause before you have
taken another step in your mistaken and indefensible policy
which shall make his cup of bitterness to overflow, and plunge
these colonies into the horrors of a savage warfare.

“Having thus disposed of the question of the true origin of
these difficulties with Philip and his people, and shown on
which side impartial justice would impute the greater blame
I now come to the present case which so manifestly grew out
of them, and which could not for a moment be of doubtful
issue but for the blinding mists of prejudice, and that most

[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]

reprehensible policy of retaliating anticipated wrongs in order
to prevent their occurrence.

“The case is a plain and simple one, requiring but two points
in the defense, either of which should be sufficient to secure
the acquittal of the prisoners.

“First, in that, I wholly deny the jurisdiction and right of
this court to seize and try these prisoners, for the crime
alleged against them. Sassamon, by his own confession, was
a spy and a traitor. And it also appears he had previously
committed some capital offence. And for these double crimes
he was probably tried by Philip's Council, and voted an outlaw,
whom it was the patriotic duty of every man of the tribe
to try to seize and destroy. And that he was so seized and
destroyed, may be equally probable. But the destroyers were
only commissioned executioners of the law of an independent
sovereignty, not murderers. And you have no right by the
law of nations, or by treaty, to interfere with the execution;
and especially so, as the deed was committed within the unceded
jurisdiction of their government.

“Second, Provided that you had the right and jurisdiction
you claim, and that Sassamon was slain by some of Philip's
tribe, you cannot convict these prisoners without clearly
identifying them as the perpetrators of the deed. Have you
done so? Do you honestly believe, that your only professed
witness of the act could identify them when standing more
than a half mile distant from the scene? Would you hang a
white man on such an identification? Let the consciences of
the jurors answer, and direct them accordingly in the making
up of their verdict. And what of the only other part of the
evidence relied on—the so called ordeal of touching the corpse,
and the claimed interposition of Heaven, in causing blood to
issue from the already putrid body? Will you look to the
agency of Heaven for the appearance of that blood, after
noting the admissions and suspicious manner of that juggling

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

witness, Dick Swain; or will you believe it came there through
an altogether different agency? Again let the consciences of
the tryers answer. This ends the case. I have done, and will
only add, let the jury beware how they render a verdict which
will this day be recorded in the books of Heaven, to be forever
open to the sleepless eyes of avenging justice, as well as
among the records of earth, too often the habitation of blind
prejudice and wilful error.”

Great was the displeasure of the court functionaries and
their supporters, at Williams' triumphant vindication of King
Philip, the great Diabolus of their prejudice, fear, and hatred;
at his fearless unmasking of their disguised policy for the
subjugation of the Indians, and especially at his ungracious
exposure of the weakness of their testimony against the already
death-doomed prisoners. All this was abundantly manifested
in the shocked and excited looks of the audience, and
the vexed and angry appearance of the court, as all eyes were
turned expectantly to Deacon Mudgridge, as the almost Heaven-commissioned
champion who would now rush to the rescue
of their endangered case. Nor were they disappointed. The
Deacon with a countenance ominous of the total annihilation
of his opponent, was instantly on his feet, hotly pouring forth
a flood of denials, criminations, and anathemas, alternately on
the head of “the heretical Sathan-siding Williams,” and on
that of “the wicked and God-accursed Sachem Philip, and his
guilty instruments, the prisoners at the bar.” But having
pretty much exhausted his fund of these peculiar resources,
in his opening speeches, he accomplished little more than
travel again over his old ground; which he did with entire
persistency and keeping to the end, and concluded with once
more vehemently demanding the conviction of the prisoners.
And the sympathizing and ready court, in a short charge
much in the spirit of the Deacon's argument, submitted the
case to the jury, who, in their turn, after a brief consultation

[figure description] Page 051.[end figure description]

among the white portion of them, and a hurried question or
two to the maudlin and stupefied Indians of the panel, voted
a verdict of guilty on the spot; when the court promptly pronounced
the sentence, and, as if fearful their victims might
escape by the usual delay, ordered that the prisoners all be
immediately taken hence to the place of execution, and hanged,
till dead, dead!

p719-057 CHAPTER III.

Blood follows blood, and through their mortal span,
In bloodier acts conclude those who with blood began.
Childe Harold.

[figure description] Page 052.[end figure description]

The instant the death-doom of the poor, fated prisoners was
pronounced, the meeting-house began to vomit forth its crowds
of now freshly excited occupants. The court and jury had
evidently the popular tide in their favor, and accordingly,
their decision, however strangely they might have arrived at
it, was applauded by the majority of the assembled crowd,
with a unanimity and emphasis that effectually overpowered
the feeble murmurs of the less bigoted few, who were disposed
to doubt the justice and wisdom of the measure. And
as the procession was being re-formed and put in motion, the
grim smile of satisfaction and inward triumph was everywhere
observable on the grave and well trained countenances of the men,
as they nodded knowingly to each other, and with quickened motions
bustled to their places in the ranks; while the same exultant
emotions found a livelier expression in the out-bursting
shouts of the boys, who, now as ever, the first to give voice to
any suppressed public feeling, ran trooping along in advance
towards the understood place of execution, the strongly enclosed
yard of the public prison. Everything, indeed, seemed
to wear the air of rejoicing. The shrill fifes struck up their
merriest tune, and the unmuffled drums fiercely rolled their
jubilant clamors upon the air; and the procession swept on
like a triumphal march, graced with the trophies of war, to
the celebration of a victory. As the head of the column

[figure description] Page 053.[end figure description]

neared the prison yard, a wide gate was thrown open, and the
living mass, both those in formal array and the flanking
crowd of eager spectators, together poured into the spacious
enclosure; when the first object that greeted their eyes was
a new gallows, from which the workmen with their hastily
snatched tools, were seen precipitately retreating, to make
room for the in-rushing torrent. So well had the authorities
anticipated the result of the trial, and the consequent need
of such a structure to carry out the programme of the day.
As this, and all similar arrangements, embracing both ropes
and rough coffins, had been thus providently effected in
advance, there was no need of any delay in proceeding at
once to the eagerly sought consummation, and accordingly,
therefore, the procession, after marching round the jail house,
situated near the high fence on one side of the spacious arena,
and then doubling in a smaller circle round the gallows, came
to a halt, so as to bring the prisoners and their guard to the
foot of the ladder leading up to the platform, which was made
of rough, new planks, sufficiently extended to admit a dozen
persons, and elevated about ten feet from the ground. The
Indian prisoners were then at once pushed forward by the
guard with the muzzles of their loaded and cocked muskets,
and driven up the ladder to the platform, to which the sheriff,
his few armed assistants, and the ever ready Dummer, again
selected to make the customary prayer on the occasion, had
all first ascended to take the victims in charge as they severally
reached the top of the ladder. The prisoners were then
placed in a row, and made to stand so as to face the greater
proportion of the thickly packed crowd of spectators below,
when they were allowed a momentary respite, professedly to
permit them to reflect on the awful fate so closely awaiting
them; but in reality, more probably, to make them an exclusive
spectacle for a few moments, when nothing else was
occurring to divert the attention of the spectators.

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

It was a strange, sad scene. First, and the most conspicuous
of the motly group now occupying the scaffold, stood the
brawny savage captain and councillor of Metacom, Tobias,
glancing with proud defiance at his executioners, and now
frowning contemptuously down upon the gazing crowd below.
Next stood the son of this unflinching prisoner, a lad of perhaps
eighteen, with a bosom visibly heaving with agitation,
but frequently glancing up to the dauntless countenance of
his father, as if to gain from his intrepid bearing the courage
that would enable him to die like a man and a warrior; and
last of the three doomed red men, stood a tall, straight, middle-aged
Indian, with head erect, and a look of boast and
scorn, which seemed to challenge the gazers to detect in him
the least sign of fear or relenting. Next, and partly enclosing
the prisoners, were arranged the sheriff's assistants,
with pistols in hand, keenly watching the former, but occasionally
glancing, as if for expected orders, to their superior,
the sheriff, a severe, matter-of-fact looking man, with that
prompt, unquestioning cast of countenance which betokened
his equal readiness to make a prayer, or hang an Indian, as
the authorities might be pleased to direct. The latter important
personage had taken his stand with a drawn sword in
his hand, a little in the rear of his line of assistants, and was
keeping his eye on Deacon Mudgridge, at the foot of the
ladder below, as if waiting for a signal to proceed; and last
among this contrasted group, apart from all, stood the pious
Shadow Dummer, with his folded hands raised to his chin,
his head meekly canted on one side, his eyes partly shut, and
his face devoutly turned heavenward.

Such was the contrasted picture presented in the important
few, who were now the focus of all eyes, either as executioners
or sufferers, that were to furnish the materials of the great
exhibition of the day, as they stood there on the platform
above, in bold relief against the sky. Below the whole broad

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

acre, constituting the part of the enclosure more especially
devoted to the purposes of the occasion, was blackened all
over by the multitude of men, boys, and the spiritless, half-civilized
red men of the vicinity, going under the name of
praying Indians, with here and there a more erect, unerring
specimen of the same race, from the forests, who had neither
pretension nor desire to claim any such distinction—all
here congregated to witness this widely bruited trial, and almost
as widely promised execution. But they presented no such
appearance as that of a modern promiscuous assemblage, diversified
by variety of habiliments, difference of deportment, and
faces of every expression, from sad and grave, to lively and
jocose. For as they stood here in their broad-brimmed, sugarloaf
hats, dark, long, and wide flapped round-abouts, trouser or
petticoat breeches, awkwardly furbelowed, or doubled over at the
knee, long, gartered hose, and buckled shoes, all of uniform cut
and color in the still unaltered fashion of the Puritan costume
of James the First—as thus garbed, they stood here, with their
stiff and measured motions, subdued demeanors, and countenances
trained to the solemn, unvarying gravity which they
supposed could alone comport with the character of a Christian
people, they seemed as much like as a herd of animals
of the same species, with one general outward appearance, one
general expression of countenance, and one deportment among
old and young; for even the boys seemed like men of a lesser
growth. And there was no perceptible variation in the appearance
of the whole vast crowd, except what might have
been occasioned by the bareheaded, blanketed Indians with
whom it was sprinkled.

But there was now a commotion among the expectant
throng. Deacon Mudgridge, still the acting director of the
ceremonies, was seen making a signal to the sheriff, who, in
turn, was seen beckoning to some one else, standing near him.
And presently the Shadow was seen slowly advancing to the

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

front of the platform, when, after a solemn pause, he gradually
upturned his cadaverous face, spread abroad his long,
bony arms, and raised his loud, heaven-aspiring voice in
thanksgiving and prayer. He thanked God for the special
care he had taken of his rock-founded church, and chosen
people in America—for the triumphs he had, from time to
time, vouchsafed them over the powers of darkness, as latterly
manifested in the raging of the heathen in the wilderness, and
especially he thanked him for the signal manner in which he
had made justice to triumph in their behalf, this day, through
the instrumentalities of wise and godly rulers and judges, and
the strong pillars of his church-household. And he prayed
that the auspicious result might be made to work a lasting
rebuke on the heathen malignants, now plotting the overthrow
of God's church and people, and teach their accursed sachem
a lesson which should strike terror into his black and guilty
heart, and make him to see that the Lord reigneth, and will
consume all those who may attempt to conspire against his
elect, like stubble in the fire, yea, like chaff in the fiery furnace.

All this, with great unction, he thanked God for, and all
this with equal unction and added fervor he prayed for, forgetting
to offer one single word in petition for mercy for the
souls of the poor red men about to be launched into eternity.
And he, doubtless, really believed, that his effort would be as
acceptable to a just and merciful heaven, as he knew it would
be to his bigot-blind hearers on earth.

Scarcely had the loud, long-drawn voice of Dummer ceased
in the suddenly modulated double amen, before that of Deacon
Mudgridge, now mounted on a block about half way between
the segregated group of court officials and the ladder, was
heard sternly muttering.

“Proceed! the prisoners have been allowed time for that
reflection, and repentance for their awful crime, which, if

[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]

rightly bestowed and truly felt, will serve, it may be, to soften
their torments in the dreadful place to which they are about
to go,—they have had ample time for this,—it is almost sunset,—
time presses,—proceed at once with the execution.”

“Proceed there!” echoed the sheriff, waving his sword to
his assistants; “lead the oldest prisoner to his drop,—the furtherest
there on the right,—adjust the noose round his neck,
and let one of you stand ready with his hatchet to cut the cord
holding up the drop, when the word is given.”

The preparations had evidently all been elaborately made.
Three separate drops, one for each prisoner, and all jutting
out nearly a yard beyond the outer edge of the platform, had
been constructed, fitted in, and made secure on a level, by a
strong cord fastened to the front part, and running up to a
round, elevated beam fixed up on the other side of the scaffolding
for the purpose. Over these drops, dangling from
the long arm of the gallows-tree, hung the fatal nooses, ready
for the necks of the prisoners.

With eager alacrity, the obsequious assistants sprang to the
execution of these designated preliminaries, and within two
minutes, the still undaunted old warrior stood out alone on the
drop, throwing his last look of contempt more defiantly than
ever around him. An attempt was then made to draw a cap
over his face, but by a sudden motion of his head, he brought
it to his feet, and kicked it scornfully down upon the hooting
crowd below.

“Strike the cord then!” shouted the sheriff.

It was done. The drop fell; and the old captain and councillor
of King Philip was a contorted corpse.

The tall prisoner was next placed upon his drop and made
ready for his fate, in the same way, and with the same hurried
manner, as if the executioners were laboring under secret
misgivings about the part they were performing, and were
anxious to have the job over. His face wore a less stoical

[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

and a more excited expression than the one just gone before
him. But he bore up bravely, proudly, and was turned off
in the midst of his own death-chant, which he went down
singing in full strain, till the jerk of the rope suddenly cut
short his song and his life together.

The ready executioners then immediately laid hold of the
last, whom we have named as the youthful prisoner. He
was now more agitated than ever, started wildly, as the first
hand was laid upon him, and hung back shuddering, and
shrinking from the fatal drop before him. But finding this
of no avail, he ceased his struggles, and, casting an agonized
look up into the faces of his executioners, he broke out into
the few English words of which he was master, and piteously
begged for his life. He might as well, however, have appealed
to the gallows itself; and the only response which his
petitions received, was the quick lasso-like throw, and the
tightening of the rope round his neck, and the violent push
that sent him staggering forward on to the drop. And before
he had time to recover his balance, came the sharp order
of the impatient sheriff to the man standing with uplifted
hatchet over the cord sustaining the drop.

“Strike!”

The rasping sound of the blow of the severing instrument
instantly followed, and the drop and the prisoner went down
together. But the next moment the crowd below was seen
suddenly to heave like a billow, and a quick half-smothered
cry of surprise and horror burst from a thousand voices. The
rope had broken; and the paralyzed, but still life-whole victim
had been landed, doubled and distorted, on the ground at the
very feet of the shrinking throng. Two soldiers of the guard
that had taken post near by, now quickly threw down their
guns, sprang forward and seized the prisoner, just as he had
succeeded, after several convulsive and ineffectual efforts, in
gaining his feet; while another, with leveled and cocked

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

musket, came up behind him. A glance at the ladder and the
horrid implements, to which he was being forced along to undergo
a second ordeal, now seemed to recall the poor fellow to
his full consciousness; and he again broke out into wild lamentations
and petitions for mercy.

“Stay a little,” said the here interposing Deacon, to whom
a new thought seemed suddenly to have occurred,—“keep
your hold, but let him stand a moment. Wretch!” he continued,
and turning sternly to the frantic and struggling
victim,—“guilty wretch, after this foretaste of what so certainly
awaits you, won't you now confess your crimes?”

The prisoner suddenly paused, and, in the first impulse of
the moment, threw a look of scorn upon the other, in return
for what was evidently deemed an insulting proposition, but
he remained silent.

“Poor heathen,” resumed the Deacon in softened tones,
instead of giving, as all seemed to expect, a fierce order for
the instant renewal of the murderous ordeal on the exhibition
of such contumacy,—“poor benighted heathen, now if you
will only say you were there and saw your father, Tobias, and
that other Indian kill Sassamon, I will give you my promise
that we won't hang you.”

The poor, tried, and tempted sufferer again paused and
seemed to be passing through a severe inward struggle between
pride,—perhaps principle, and the love of life. The
latter, however, as he glanced up to the dead bodies of his
kindred, and the gallows, with the already substituted new
rope awaiting his neck, at length appeared to prevail, and he
repeated over in the affirmative the words which the other had
shaped for him.

“Then you say, and truly confess, that you did see Tobias
and the other Indian kill Sassamon, and put him through
the ice?”

“Y-a-s,—said so.”

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

“And you stood by yourself, saw the deed done, and did
nothing to prevent it?”

“Y-a-s, but no help do it,—no touch him, one time, at all.”

“There!” exclaimed the Deacon, triumphantly, mounting
a block, and waving his hand to attract the attention of the
whole assemblage, as well as that of all the court authorities,—
“there! what will the blaspheming doubters say, now? He
has confessed,—one of the very murderers themselves has
fully confessed the foul deed! The verdict, sentence, and
execution of the two dead, hell-deserving murderers, all now
stand completely vindicated. It was but Heaven's justice
upon them. They were both rightfully executed. And this
poor wretch, also, who has just owned himself an accomplice
in the deed,—what can he now say against his well-merited
doom? `Out of his own mouth will I condemn him saith
my God.” How shall we, then, dare incur His displeasure,
by suffering the wretch to escape the death which the sentence
this day so justly pronounced against him, and, which
is now required at our hands? I confess,” he added, looking
round to those who had acted as the magistrates at the
trial,—“I freely confess I do not see how we can avoid such
a God-bounden duty.”

“No, truly, brother Mudgridge,” mildly responded one of
the magistrates; “but you gave him your promise that he
should not be hanged, if he confessed, as he did; and it were
to be wished, in ordinary cases—not that I would contend
that a promise to a heretic heathen, and made to bring about,
as we are commanded, the ends of justice, should be deemed
a conscience-binding matter—still, as I was about to say, it
were rather, perhaps, to be wished that there was no necessity
of contravening the literal words of the promise.”

“I concur with the brother who has just spoken,” said another
of the court, a little more firmly; “but as the promise was
made, I should prefer not to have it broken, at least, not in

[figure description] Page 061.[end figure description]

direct terms. If the governor, who withdrew just before the
prisoners were swung off, was here, perhaps he would—”

“The promise need not be broken—I said he should not be
hung, and he shan't,” interposed the Deacon, lowering his voice,
and looking knowingly to the magistrates—“leave that to me.”

So saying, he turned round to the soldier standing with
leveled gun, a few yards behind the prisoner, and hurriedly
gave him some signal. The deafening report of a musket the
next instant burst from the spot. And as the smoke rose,
the hapless young Indian was seen prostrate and writhing in
dying agony on the ground.

Thus was consummated a measure so unwisely begun, so
questionably conducted, and so horribly concluded. As a
matter of policy only, it was, under the circumstances, a measure
of madness from its inception; it was persisted in and
carried on in violation of many of the most established principles
of law and justice, and brought to close in a manner,
about which, even some of the bigoted actors themselves,
were evidently not without their misgivings. Especially was
this betrayed in the case of Deacon Mudgridge, who, as soon
as the last act was over, seemed impatient to have the crowd
depart, lest, probably, his opponent in the trial, Williams, or
others like him, who were perhaps present, should make a
speech questioning some of the proceedings; and, after fidgeting
awhile at the delay of the spectators, who seemed in no
haste to move, he sought the never failing Dummer, and suggested
that perhaps a few words had better be said, as a sort
of announcement that the proceedings were over, or as a dismissal
of the assembly; whereupon the ever ready Shadow, in
a strange mingling of the announcement of a crier, with the
benediction of a minister, jumbled together in accordance
with the wording of the hint just received, mounted a bench
and loudly exclaimed—

“The Lord reigneth, let the people rejoice! The

[figure description] Page 062.[end figure description]

spectacles of the day are over. The assembly is dismissed, and will
now retire to their homes; and may the Lord add his blessing,
and suitably impress them all by the solemn scenes they
have this day witnessed. Amen.”

But contrary to the announcement of the Shadow, and no
less to the wishes of the Deacon, the proceedings of the day
were not to close without an additional scene, and one, too,
which was as unwelcome to many as it was unexpected to all.
As the crowd were beginning to get in motion, preparatory
to taking their departure, individuals in different parts of the
swaying throng were seen suddenly stopping short, and pointing
excitingly up over the top of the tall fence on the western
side of the enclosure. One after another rapidly caught the
significant gestures; and soon the whole assembly were
brought to a stand, and their eyes turned in the direction of
the indicated spot.

There, in the last flickering gleams of the setting sun, planted
on the flat roof of an old deserted building, a little removed
from the other side of the fence, but so far overtopping it as
to bring it within view of all, conspicuously stood, side by
side, two persons of the different sexes, both garbed in dress and
insignia which sufficiently betokened at once their race and
individual distinction. The man, who was tall, strongly built,
but in exquisite proportions, with a towering Grecian head,
and features of corresponding shapeliness, wore on his head a
snugly setting coroniform cap, composed of an encircling belt
of bright wampun, and surmounted by a single tastily enwreathed
plume of red feathers—on his feet and legs, gaily
beaded, yellow gaiters; and on his body a blue broad cloth
frock, made whole like a hunting shirt, terminating in a red
fringe at the knees, and confined round the waist by a broad
wampun girdle. These, with the bright-bladed tomahawk, that
gleamed from his girdle, and the long gun that stood resting in
the hollow of his arm at his side, completed his dress, and all his

[figure description] Page 063.[end figure description]

visible equipment. The woman, once the belle and beauty of
the forest, and still of a model figure, and finely cut features,
was similarly accoutred, except in the lengthened skirt and
high bosom by which the Indian female costume is mainly
distinguished.

“It is King Philip!”—“Aye, King Philip and Queen
Weetamo!” were soon heard buzzing through the surprised
and agitated throng of gazers below. For a moment after he
was discovered, the chief object of their riveted attention remained
motionless, silent, and thoughtful. But now he advanced
a step, his lips opened, and his voice, rising like the
first low notes of a trumpet, rang out clear and distinct upon
the air:—

“Listen! listen, pale faces of Plymouth! listen to the last
words which Metacom has desire ever to say to you. The men
that my father could have brushed into the sea with his hand,
but instead gave them all the lands they wanted, protected
them in their feebleness, and all his life stood between them
and the hostile tribes who would have destroyed them —these
men have grown too strong to remember his kindness in their
treatment to his son. True, they have talked peace, but done
the works of war, Metacom has talked peace and showed his
good faith by doing the works of peace. They have made
treaties with him as a king, and used him as a subject bound
to obey them, and bear all they put upon him, without word
or question. They have seized on his lands and hunting
grounds, on claim of deeds from traitor Indians, that they knew
had no right to sell them. They have got his people drunk
and cheated them out of their furs and wampun. They have
forced him to give up the hunting guns by which his people
got their living. They have put heavy fines upon him. They
have taken his bad Indians by the hand, and rewarded them
for lying about him. They have thought to make him a
slave, and once planned to seize him as a prisoner, and serve

[figure description] Page 064.[end figure description]

him, may be, as they did his brother. All these things they
have done; and so broken their treaty, as many times as the
snows have come and gone, since he took the place of his father.
But still Metacom wanted peace. He would not
listen to the words of war from his tribe, who knew there was
good cause of war; for he yet hoped that the pale faces would
soon show some of the repentance and good doing they so
much preach to the Indians. And he stood between them
and his angry warriors. Yet he found none of the good
doing, but much of the worse. He soon found them threatening
war against him, unless he came to Plymouth to humble
and put himself in subjection. And because he did not come
they sent a paid spy among his tribe—one who was before a
traitor, and a criminal, but spared death in great mercy, and
who now died for his double crime. They then, guided by
other traitors, came within his treaty limits, seized the best
men of his tribe as murderers, who were no murderers. As
murderers they tried and sentenced them, instead of giving
them up to be tried by their own people as you were bound by
your treaty to do. And now you have dared to choke them
to death with ropes, after your own fashion, like dogs, or your
Quakers and witches. And there they hang, to tell the red
man the story of the way in which you would have peace and
friendship with his people. Metacom has been here to see
with his own eyes how you have made this black finish to
your high heaped insults and outrages. And he has now
opened his mouth to tell you he will hold back the hatchets
of his warriors no longer. And if they now be made red—
if your houses burn, and your people die—on your own contriving
heads rest the blood of your slain men—on your own
affrighted eyes flash the light of your burning buildings, and
on your own guilty ears ring the cries of your perishing
women and children.”

During the first part of this cutting and most unwelcome

[figure description] Page 065.[end figure description]

expose, the red man's wrongs and their forbearing chief's grievances
coming as if in confirmation of the uneasy Deacon's apprehensions,
though from a far different source, that important
personage made no active demonstrations, and only stood
wincing, and frowning his pious indignation. But as the
bold speaker was drawing to the close, which involved a
virtual declaration of war, the pent wrath of the former began
to show itself in action. He started, looked fiercely around,
and then hastened in among the group of the amazed, but
more quiet officials, held a low, hurried consultation with
them, and then ran back, and made some communication to
the guard, the nature of which the next moment became apparent.
A strong detachment of the guard was seen rushing
towards the entrance of the enclosure, and the rest, on a
fresher instigation, hastily cocking and raising their muskets.
But all in vain. The quick eye of the wary chief had detected,
and rightly divined the whole movement. And before the
sound of his last terrible words had died on the ears of his
dismayed and trembling listeners, he had disappeared, and was
lost, alike as a target for those preparing to fire on him from
within, and as a prisoner-prize for those sent round to seize
him from without. He had somehow strangely slipped away
and was nowhere to be found.

But though Philip, who had caused so much annoyance to
the court leaders, as well as the deep sensation everywhere
apparent among the general mass of the assemblage, had now
disappeared, and all seemed to breathe easier, like men suddenly
relieved from the presence of some fearful apparition—
though Philip, the chief cause of the commotion, had disappeared;
yet neither the one class nor the other of the disturbed
throng were to be let off without a finale of the strange
scene, calculated to sink deeper in minds imbued with superstition
than anything in the one they had just witnessed.
Philip had indeed taken his final departure, but his companion

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

remained unmoved and motionless, standing up in the gray
twilight like some antique bronze statue, frowning down upon
all, but with looks particularly bent on the soldiers who had
just been baulked of their noble game, and who still stood
with their guns partly raised in the direction, and seemingly
hesitating, in their evident surprise that she had not taken
fright and fled also, whether she was to be made a substitute
target for their bullets. In a moment she defiantly took a
step in advance, and with wild gestures, and in shrill and
frantic tones, exclaimed,—

“Let the pale faces fire, if they like. It would be a brave
thing to kill a squaw, and a fitting close of their bloody
days' doings! Aye, let them fire, if they will, and finish an
old work on the queen-wife of the murdered Alexander!
What! cowards, are you afraid of a woman? Then hear the
curse and prophecy of the bruised and broken-hearted Wetamoo,
who has been made strong enough to live only by the
hope of seeing the hour when her terrible wrongs should be
avenged! Base poisoners of my noble husband, that sweet
hour is at hand. The day of the red man's reckoning has
come. The bitter curse, which, in all her dreams, and in all
her day doings, has for years been burning in the torn bosom
of Wetamoo, is at last about to light upon your heads. You
have at last aroused the old lion of his long angry tribe, and
you will soon see the difference between Philip in the war-path,
and Philip meekly asking peace in your council lodge.
He will soon see for every drop of the blood of his people you
have this day shed, a whole river flowing from your own.
And the glad eyes of Wetamoo will soon see, too, for every
hair of her murdered husband's head, a bloody scalp torn
from the heads of the pale faces, swinging in the lodges of the
red men. You made Wetamoo a widow, and you have made
two other widows to-day, but for every widow you have made
among the red men, you shall see a thousand wailing widows

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

among yourselves. Your houses and hearthstones shall all be
made red with blood, and your whole land heavy with tears.
This is the curse and prophecy of Wetamoo, and by her God,
and by your God, she swears that the one shall follow you till
every word and jot of the other be fulfilled.”

She ceased. As she had been permitted, notwithstanding
the boldness of her denunciations, and the fearful import of
her prophetic maledictions, to proceed unmolested, so unmolested
she was allowed to retire from her stand, and go where
she chose. And so ended the day, made memorable in Puritan
history, as the precursor of the desolating and terrible
Indian war that so closely followed. Yes, the day, with all
its exciting scenes, had at length ended; but it had ended in
a manner which was as little anticipated by the movers of its
principal proceedings as it was relished by them. Their object
in the arrest, trial, and summary execution of the poor victimized
red men, was far less to further the ends of justice,
than to overawe Philip and his tribe, and all other tribes
with whom he might otherwise ally himself for hostile purposes;
and at the same time gratify the bitter prejudices of
their whole people, and impress them with the desired ideas
of their own inflexible justice, and fearlessness in executing
it. It was with the originators, therefore, what they doubtless
deemed a very sagacious political measure, especially devised
to intimidate the apprehended foe, and thus, to use a
modern phrase, to conquer a peace with the dreaded Philip
and his stubborn tribe, which they were conscious could, with
their own deliberately aggressive policy, be in no other manner
obtained. And these astute managers evidently had, to
the end of the trial, even in despite the untoward appearance
and effort of Roger Williams, fully succeeded in keeping the
popular current, as before intimated, running strongly on
their side, as manifested in the fierce exultation of the whites,
and the trembling awe of the praying and other Indians in

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

attendance, at the result of the promptly conducted prosecution.
But the execution, especially the last act of the revolting
scene, had obviously been an overdose even for Bigotry
herself. A reaction of feeling was beginning to take effect;
and doubt and apprehension on the white, and kindling
resentment on the Indian spectators, were usurping the place
of the defiant exultations and over-weening confidence of the
one, and the abject fears of the other, that but a few hours
before were on all sides so palpably displayed.

It was of this altered state of feeling in the mingled crowd,
that the sagacious Philip, who had been an unseen spectator
of the whole scene, and whose discriminating eye had detected
the change of the moral current, had suddenly resolved to
take the advantage by boldly showing himself, and make a
speech intended no less for effect on his own recreant subjects
present, than on the superstitious and bigot-blind followers of
the court of Plymouth. And he had counted not in vain.
His bold and skillful effort, falling, as it did, on the doubtful
and fluctuating feelings of the crowd, had brought the gathering
tide against him at least to an ebb. And the work which
he had so successfully begun seemed to receive a finishing
blow in the fiery and fearful words of the wrongs-treasuring
Wetamoo, whose weirdlike foretokenings of blood and desolation
fell on ears and hearts too deeply impressed with the wild
superstitions of the times to resist the spell of fear and foreboding,
which those words were so well calculated to throw
over them.

Thus did the outgeneraling chief turn the arms of the
court of Plymouth against themselves, in all that related to
the effect counted on from their measure, as was abundantly
shown, not only by the silent, thoughtful, and strangely altered
manner in which the mingled assemblage dispersed that night,
but by the general panic that immediately followed among the
whites, and the disappearance of large numbers of recreant or

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

praying Indians, who were found flocking to the standard of
their old master, now, for the first time, thrown defiantly on
the breeze.

“But, can this”—here, perhaps, asks the surprised and
doubting reader, whose ears, from his youth upwards, have
been continually regaled with the unqualified, stereotyped
laudations of the intelligence and exalted virtues of the Pilgrim
Fathers, which, almost from time immemorial, have been
one of the accepted droppings of the pulpit, and one of the
staple themes of Fourth of July and Pilgrim-day rostrums—
“can this be a truthful picture of the treatment and policy
of the colonists towards the Indians, or those of them, at least,
who declined to part with their tribal independence? Can it
be any thing like a fair representation of the proceedings of
one of the courts of justice of that day? And, finally, can it
place in a true light the hitherto unquestioned religious character
of the rulers and chief actors in the public affairs of
that peculiar era?”

We hope not, doubting reader; for the credit of our forefathers,
we really hope it is an exaggerated picture, or at least
one of a very limited application. But till you shall have
traveled back with us, and, unbiased by all pre-conceived
opinions, have carefully examined the records of those times,
taken all the facts and circumstances stated and admitted by
cotemporary writers, and, rejecting all modern eulogistic or
palliating commentaries, have drawn for yourself all the fairly
deducible inferences—till you have done this, and convinced
us and yourself, by that only safe process of arriving at the
truth, that our picture is an unwarranted and improbable one,
we must let it stand, and bear the responsibility of its general
truthfulness.

The great mistake of the pilgrim fathers consisted in
making the civil rule subservient to the ecclesiastical. This,
from the very nature of the case, ever has led, and ever must

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

lead, to grave errors in the administration of justice, and fatal
mis-steps in governmental policy; for the leaders of the
church less often attain their positions of influence by the
capacities which would qualify them to become advisers and
dictators in civil proceedings, than by the mere fervor of
their religious enthusiasm; and their counsels, consequently,
must ever be unsafe, and, however honestly intended, not
unfrequently lead to measures productive of public mischief
or individual wrong. This placing of the civil power under
church control would have been less dangerous, doubtless, if
the church had been built up on the best principles for insuring
its purity. But this could not have been so here; for
here, again, the pilgrim fathers fell into another error, which
must often have been as injurious to the interests of true
religion, as it was unsafe in the administration of civil authority.
They had established the rule, that no man should hold
any office unless he was a member of the church. If human
nature was the same then as now, this was virtually offering a
reward for hypocrisy, under which all the most cunning, calculating,
and ambitious, without any reference to their secret
feelings or belief, would go through the forms of a profession,
and rush into the church. And the same unscrupulous ambition
and lack of principle that had induced them to seek
admission into the sacred fold, would, when they got there,
induce them to strive for posts of influence, where they could
control the sincere and undiscerning, and, through the power
thus obtained, subserve their own wicked or selfish purposes
at the expense of private right and public welfare.

Under all these circumstances, therefore, why should it be
thought strange or improbable to find in control, at times, that
class of men of whom we have made Deacon Mudgridge the
representative, or that the latter should find ready instruments
in another and entirely honest class, represented by the sincere
but zeal-blinded Dummer, and still more ready tools in yet

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

another, and the most despicable class of all, represented by
the pliant and unscrupulous Dick Swain?

The pilgrims closely resembled the Jews, whom they
avowedly copied. But it should be said of both, that, with
all their faults, the severe physical training they imposed upon
themselves, and the high moral energies they cultivated, were
admirably calculated to make nurseries of men destined to
found great and powerful nations. The training of Moses
made the soldiers of Joshua and David, whose achievements
resulted in the establishment of the splendid empire of Solomon;
and the training of the pilgrims made the soldiers of
our revolution, and their achievements have also resulted,
under a more diffused intelligence, and modified and more
correct views of the offices and requirements of religion, in
the still more splendid and beneficent fabric of our present
American liberty.

With these remarks, intended to meet the scruples of the
doubters at the threshold, and apprise all that we do not intend
to follow the beaten track any farther than we think it
leads to truth and justice, we will return to the thread of our
narrative.

p719-077 CHAPTER IV.

“His virtues being overdone, his face
Too grave, his prayers too long, his charities
Too pompously attended, and his speech
Larded too frequently, and out of time,
With serious phraseology,—were rents
That in his garments opened in spite of him,
Through which the well accustomed eye could see
The rottenness of his heart.”
Pollock's Hypocrite.

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

Night had now cast its sable mantle over the earth, and the
tumults of the day and the strong passions of human throngs
had subsided in the darkness. But soon the great, round
moon came rolling up from behind the seemingly long, watery
mound that bounded the sea-ward limits of the scene; and
anon the whole extended view of land and waters, first gradually
disclosed in the clustering pencils of her mellow beams,
shooting athwart the broad expanse of the sleeping bay, and
then tipping with silvered fringes the varied objects of the
surrounding shore, stood revealed in all the solemn splendors
of a moon-lit land-scape.

Perhaps there is no scene or situation that so much disarms
us of the promptings of selfish or evil inclinations, and disposes
up to pensive contemplation, as that in which we find
ourselves, when looking abroad in a bright moonlight night.
We feel that it is neither night nor day, and while we are
tempted to forego the mental quiescence of the one, we are
restrained from pondering the agitating schemes of the other,
partly, it may be, from the conscious uselessness of then

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

nerving ourselves for any action, but more, we believe, from the
mysteriously softening and benign influences of the hour
And that gravely humorous bard, who penned the couplet:—


—“then rose full soon
That patroness of rogues the moon,”
fouly libeled the character of the amiable queen of night.

Her patronage is not sought by the prowling felon and evil
doer, who love darkness, but by the lover and sentimentalist,
who delight to appropriate her propitious influences. Job
speaks of the sweet influences of the pleiades, but if any of
the heavenly bodies possess and exert any such properties on
the human family, the moon, we think, is clearly entitled to
the pre-eminence. And if, under her sober and quiet dispensation,
the thoughts of the imaginative and superstitious
sometimes take flights not warranted by reason, or shape
themselves into distempered fancies, it would hardly be fair
to hold her chargeable for their vagaries.

The same bright luminary, which had thus brought into
beautified prospect the varied features of the landscape, also
brought into view scores of the good people of Plymouth,
who, tempted by the beauty of the evening, and moved with
an uneasiness and concern that led them to seek companionship
for an interchange of opinions, had left their houses and
gone into the streets. And here they were seen standing in
scattered groups around the open doors, in the yards, or in
the road-ways, discussing, with subdued demeanors, and low,
suppressed tones, the incidents of the day, and the consequences
which might flow from them. From the anxious and
disturbed manner and tones every where observable among
both speakers and listeners, the fact became obvious that a
general feeling of doubt and perplexity had fallen on the
people; and that the boasted measure of their rulers, which
had that day been consummated, and from which so much
had been promised and predicted, towards intimidating King

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

Philip and his tribe, was not only felt to have proved a failure,
but that what had been done would be likely to hasten on the
menaced evil. Mingling with the rest of one of the principal
groups thus assembled in the streets, were again found
most of the personages who were introduced in the opening
scene of the day; and among them stood the gab-gifted Shadow,
holding forth in his usual strain, but with words particularly
intended for those who had been timidly giving open expression
to the general feeling of doubt and apprehension, now
become too irrepressible to be longer concealed.

“It is,” said he,—“it is from the sins of the people, and our
lack of duty-doing courage to wash our hands of them, by fitting
and acceptable acts of expiation, that we have only to
fear. Every day I behold doings that will make us to
stink in the nostrils of heaven. Every day mine eyes are
pained with sights among old and young, that proclaim us in
a loud voice—yea, in the voice of many thunders, to be a
perverse and sinful generation. Our women are seen decked
with vain ornaments. Our young men and maidens are seen
familiarly walking together in the streets in open day, or riding,
side by side, into the country for vain recreations, after the
manner of the carnal minded and uncircumcised. The holy
Sabbath is desecrated in our midst by cooking victuals, and secular
conversation on that sacred day. The land has become
full of heresies and abominable doctrines. And even we of the
household of faith, I greatly fear me, have erred and done foolishly
in that we have not frowned upon, and put a stop to
these loose doings of the people; and especially in that we
have not put down with the arm of the law, sanctified and
made strong by the orderings of the Church, the damnable
heresies of the Quakers, and other schismatics, as we formerly
did, and as the law even now commands us to do. Yea, I
greatly fear we have erred and gone astray by our want of
faithfulness and mistaken omissions of duty, to wipe away the

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

reproach brought upon us by these abominations. But there is
now great reason to hope that our skirts will soon become cleared
of the sin of our remissness. We have this day made manifest
our determination to avoid and avert from our guilty land
the curse that fell on Saul for sparing the heathen, Amalekitish
Agag, whom God had ordered his people to destroy. We
have this day executed vengeance on three worse heathen
than the idolatrous followers of Agag, wherein our modern
Agag of the wilderness will be made to fear and tremble.”

“He did not appear to fear and tremble much to-day,
methought, when he appeared before the whole court and people,
at the close of the execution, and so boldly told them
what they might expect from what they had done,” carelessly
remarked Vane Willis, the successful young marksman, before
introduced, who seemed to have been listening rather impatiently
to the Shadow's notions of duty and way of carrying
them out.

“The young man mistakes the manifestations,” rejoined
Dummer. “The scourging of Sathana will make him to rave
and howl, and the more he raves and howls, the stronger the
token that he hath been hit and balked in his devilish designs.
Now, I look upon the chafings and raging of that audacious
Sachem, and that she-devil and heathen sorceress he brought
with him, to alarm us with false prophecy, as a sure sign that
our wise and fearless rulers have done that which has struck
him in a vital part. It is a good omen, brethren. This chafing
child of Sathana, as he clearly is, may rage awhile, but he
will soon slink back to his place; and we shall hear no more
of him, or his rebellions. And this I know, is Deacon Mudgridge's
opinion.”

So saying, the self-satisfied zealot turned and walked off to
the residence of his oracle, the important personage whose
opinion he had just quoted as something too infallible ever to

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

be gainsayed or questioned, leaving the rest of the company
to resume their discussion.

“Dummer is a man of great faith,” observed one of the
more thinking and discreet of the group, after the subject of
his remark had got out of hearing; “and I hope his predictions
about the effect and consequence of this day's work will
prove true ones. But—”

“But what?” interposed Sniffkin, the aristocratic young
court lackey of the opening scene of the story—“but what,
sir? Mr. Dummer is undoubtedly right. The court acted
wisely, and knew what they were about when they started this
measure. It was a grand stroke of policy; and what is better,
they have carried it to the end in a manner well calculated
to ensure the object. And the effect on the damned
Sachem will be just what Dummer predicts. I am confident
of it.”

“If you knew better what stuff Metacom was made of, you
might be a trifle less confident, perhaps,” responded Willis,
quietly.

“It is quite consistent,” retorted Sniffkin, contemptuously,
without turning to the speaker—“consistent, and to be expected,
that a fellow who showed so much sympathy for the
guilty heathen before their trial, and then at the trial assisted
a noted heretic to thwart justice and get them clear, should
now try to destroy the effect of the wholesome example of a
result he wished to prevent. If Mr. Dummer, whose face is
set like a flint against scoffers, and all those who consort with
heathens and heretics, had known the fellow he spoke to, his
just rebuke would not have been quite so mild a one, I fancy.
I think some folks had better look out, lest they soon find
their feet on slippery places.”

“I think so, too,” chimed in Dick Swain, still smarting
under the remembrance of the hazardous dilemma in which he
believed Willis had assisted Williams to place him at the

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

trial. “I think just so myself; for now the guilty heathen
dogs are disposed of, the Quakers and heretics, I understand,
are to have their turn next.”

“And hypocrites, knaves, and fools are then to have their
own way without let or hindrance, I suppose,” rejoined the
marksman, with an air of undisguised disdain, as he whirled
on his heel, and left the group, on his way up the street.

“Dog him, Dick,” whispered Sniffkin, into the ear of the
other, pointing after his retiring rival; “dog him; see where
he goes. And as matters now appear to be in a good shape
to leave, I will go home.”

The two last named persons then departed on their different
destinations, leaving the rest of the company to continue the
discussion unbiased by the words or presence of either of the
contending parties, to whom they had been listening.

“I am afraid,” at length remarked the man who had ventured
to intimate some doubts respecting Dummer's confident
assurances. “I am afraid that young man, though rather
rough and irreverent, perhaps, towards Mr. Sniffkin and Dick
Swain, is right in what he evidently believes will be the consequence
of hanging these Indians. I am afraid our rulers
have been a little too fast.”

“And so am I,” responded another, who had also been
smothering his convictions. “I didn't think so much of it
till I heard King Philip, standing up there so calm and dignified
like, tell over how he had intended to keep peace, and
then come out so bold and square for war at last, on account
of what he had seen there to-day. I couldn't help thinking
that there was something kinder reasonable in what he said;
and then to hear the Indian woman, who is, like enough, a
witch, as Mr. Dummer says, and can foretell things, to hear
her curse and prophesy! Why, it enymost made my hair
stand up on my head!”

Others, now all restraints on giving free utterance to their

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

feelings were removed, were beginning, all at once, to give expression
to the boding fears with which their minds were also
laboring; when they were cut short by the sudden appearance
of a man running towards them from another group that had
been standing at some distance, and in a more open part of the
street.

“Have you seen the great mystery?” he almost breathlessly
exclaimed; “have you here noticed the strange appearance of
the moon to-night?”

“No, what is it? what is it?” eagerly demanded a dozen
excited voices.

“Here, come to this open place, you can see it between the
houses—there,” continued the herald of the strange tidings, as
the others all now rushed to the spot, “there, only look there,
a blood-stained human scalp, right in the middle of the
moon!”

All eyes followed the eagerly pointed finger, till they rested
on the innocent face of the luminary that had so suddenly become
an object of suspicious interest; when, surely enough,
a scalp seemed, to their startled and distorted visions, to have
grown out of that scraggy, opake spot in the moon which has
so often attracted the eyes of wondering childhood, at all
times, but which now, owing to the peculiar state of the atmosphere,
was seen marked and defined with unusual distinctness.
First one, then another, and then all, assisted by
their excited imaginations, recognized the shape and appearance
of that horrid token of savage ferocity, and unanimously
proclaimed it an omen of coming war, which could no longer
be mistaken. But they were not to be required to rely alone
on the evidence of this monstrous prefiguration for proof of the
near approach of such a calamitous event. In a few moments
the amazed and shuddering gazers were aroused by the sounds
of multitudinous footfalls; and turning, they saw a dusty horseman,
with a mingled crowd of excited men and boys hurrying

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

along, behind, and on each side of him, in full march towards
them.

“News, news!” shouted a man, who now started forward in
advance of the rest of the new comers by way of heralding
their approach; “great news from the other colony! Here is
a man straight from Boston. Form a ring, form a ring, and
then we can all hear him relate the strange tidings he brings
us.”

A ring was accordingly formed, and the news-monger,
still sitting on his horse, proceeded to relate to the gaping
crowd, how, one or two days before, “in a clear, still, sunshiny
morning, there were divers persons in Maldon, who
heard in the air, on the south-east of them, a great gun go off,
and presently thereupon, the report of small guns, like musket
shot, very thick discharging, as if there had been a battle.”
In another town, the people had been astonished by “the flying
of bullets, which came singing over their heads; after which
the sound of drums, passing along west-ward was very audible.”
And in several other places, invisible troops of horses
were heard riding to and fro, like squadrons charging in hostile
conflict.*

Great was the fear and perplexity that fell on the minds
of the crowd as they listened to the narration of these prodigies,
which, with the one they themselves had just witnessed
they all, with one accord, and without one thought of attempting
to account for them on natural principles, set down as unmistakably
portents of war. And thinking of their wives and children,
in their agitation and dismay, they immediately broke up,
and hurried to their homes, as if the dreadful tomahawk might
be already busy there in the work of death.

But, while these things were thus agitating, with doubts
and fears, the common people without, there was one within

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

doors that evening, who, wrapt in his own self-sufficiency,
was never more assured and exultant in his life; and that one
was the chief mover, and the most active participator in the
events of the past day—the untiring Deacon Mudgridge, to
whose affectedly plain, but really very costly mansion, we will
now take the reader.

The Deacon, having finished his supper, and visited his
private cupboard for that little addition to creature comforts,
which he occasionally took just “for stomach's sake,” had repaired
to his usual sitting room, where he was accustomed to
receive the numerous calls of those daily coming to consult
him on matters of church and state; for so important in the
public mind had his opinions become, that few things of any
moment, in either, were undertaken without his advice or
concurrence. He was now slowly pacing his room and soliloquizing
half aloud, in that kind of strange jumble of prayer
and self-gratulation, to which the scathing genius of Burns
subsequently gave form and habitation in “Holy Willie,” and
his prayer—

“Ay, here, firm as a rock, while others faint, or would succumb
to the powers of darkness. And then the great matter
of this day—Lord, I bless thee for carrying me through it,
and exalting my horn in that thou hast given me the triumph—
(Well, I think they will see, now, that but for me,
the heathen had never been thus signally chastised and discomfited,
to the saving of the people and the glory of God.
But that accursed schismatic Williams! verily, I did not
know, one while, how the thing would befal.) Yet thou,

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

Lord, didst rebuke my want of faith by giving me the victory.
Nevertheless, Lord, do not let that vile man come between
me and thy helping hand again, lest, peradventure, the
people in their weakness be led away by him. Lord, put thy
hand upon him, and all thine enemies, and continue to build
up thy servant, whom thou hast so much blest, and particularly
aid and assist him by thine orderings, in that other
matter which thou knowest he has in mind to see perfected,
and—”

A gentle rap, rap, on the outside of the door opening from
the street into the apartment, here interrupted the Deacon,
and quickly assuming the meekly wise and sanctimonious air,
which he usually wore in public, he responded—

“Peace be with you! come in.”

The door opened, and the Shadow meekly entered.

“Well pleased at thy coming, friend Dummer, inasmuch
as it gives me opportunity to thank and congratulate thee on
thy faithful and opportune public services, during the day
just brought to such a triumphant close.”

“I did not come expecting such praise, Deacon Mudgridge,
and I greatly fear me, I do not deserve it. I feel myself but
a poor weak vessel, Deacon Mudgridge.”

“And therein consisteth your strength, because it maketh
you to lean directly on the Lord, who turneth trusting weakness
into a strength to the overcoming of the children of Belial.
Your prayers, to-day, friend Dummer, were full of holy
power, and had an extraordinary adaptedness.”

“I will not try to disguise how much it pleaseth my heart
to hear such words from one who hath it in his power to advance
those who are found worthy, to posts of greater usefulness
in the Lord's household; and I have sometimes thought
that if—”

“Ay—ay—I know, and it shall be brought about speedily,

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

friend Dummer. But how do men say I acquitted myself, to-day,
against the adverse powers brought against me?”

“With admirable wisdom; and it was of that I principally
came to congratulate thee; and I think we of the household
of faith ought all to feel great and exceeding gratitude, that
we have such a buckler and shield to ward off the arrows of
Sathana, whose presence methought was never more visible
than to-day.”

“Your last remark shows you to be a man of discernment,
friend Dummer. You are verily right about the devilish
manifestations of to-day, especially in the untoward coming,
and through all the subtle managings and arguings of that
man of sin, the schismatic and dangerous Williams.”

“Yea, truly; but then, with what astonishing quickness
and power you met his devices, and overwhelmed him at every
point, Deacon?”

“Ay, you must bear in mind I am an old soldier in the
Church Militant, friend Dummer. I saw from the first moment
of the trial, from tokens well known to me, that Sathan
had come up to defeat us, and was already busy with his invisible
instigations, at the ear of Williams, as was another I
could name. But arming myself in the panoply of prayer and
divine promptings, I followed the old sarpent in all his doublings
and windings, and think, as you say, that I completely
circumvented him at every point, and carried the battle gloriously;
yea, even unto the righteous termination thereof. But
not mine the praise—not mine the glory, friend Dummer.”

“Truly not, Deacon Mudgridge; but then we cannot help
admiring the chosen and honored instrument of such achieved
glories, whereby both church and state were crowned, as to-day,
with righteous judgment unto the manifest averting of calamities.”

“Thus much I don't know that I should try to prevent,
friend Dummer. But did you perceive anything in the goings

[figure description] Page 083.[end figure description]

on at the execution, betoking to your mind the presence of
Sathan there also?”

“Verily I did think I perceived his promptings in the ravings
of the audacious Sachem, and moreover in the false
prophecies and vile cursings of the red sorceress, as I think
she must be, who was with him, at their mysterious coming.
Yea, I did perceive tokens of his presence, and have already
asserted it, in my laborings with the people, in the street, this
very evening.”

“You did right, both in the assertions, and in your laborings,
which, as I suggested, when we left the scene, seemed to
be required to calm, and put confidence into the minds of the
people, who, through their weakness, were, I perceived, troubled
with some misgivings. But you might have gone further and
pointed out to them the marvel of the breaking of the rope,
when the last of the damnable trio was swung off; for what
but Sathan's own hand could have sundered that strong, new
rope? Nothing. It was scorched and made rotten by the hot
grasp of his fiery fingers. But you saw that I did not allow
his cunning device to serve him; for the young imp, he had
thought thus to save, as soon as we had got his confession, was
sent to hellward almost as quick as his accursed companions.
Yea, I saw all that clearly; and when the impudent Sachem
and his she confederate so strangely appeared up there, as if they
had been transported to the spot through the air by the taking
of one under each arm, methought I could distinctly see him
standing bodily, in the shape of the great Apollyon himself,
leaning over from behind them, and grinning and gibbering
into their ears. It was then I gave the order to the soldiers
to fire, and had they done so quick enough, the Sachem had
died; since I had breathed a hasty blessing on the undischarged
bullets. And I an't so sure but the infernal prompter
himself would have been grievously wounded.”

“These things are truly marvelous, Deacon, and fill me

[figure description] Page 084.[end figure description]

with amazement at your penetrating ability. But do you
think we have done all we must do, in the purging out of
diabolisms and heresies in the land, before the Lord will fully
accept us and make us to be wholly victorious over our
enemies?”

“No, of a verity we have not; and it rejoiceth me exceedingly
to find one at least, who, like you, seems to have a just
and holy sense of what is required of the church and rulers
in these times of evil omen. We must first wrestle mightily
with God by prayer and fastings, and at the same time be
doing the works of faith by putting down, with a fearless
hand, all kinds of heresies and misdoings.”

“It is a truth, Deacon Mudgridge—a sad truth, and one
that should shame us to be up and doing. We are over slack
and timid in our marked lines of duty, and I concur with your
opinions, even unto the full measure thereof. Something must
be done; but where do you think it were most expedient to
make the beginning of the needful and wholesome work of
sin-purging and acceptable expiation?”

“On just the like of that dangerous schismatic, (and a rank
heretic, also, I doubt me not,) who made us so much trouble
to-day, whom I think our rulers erred in admitting to speak,
and who, instead, ought to have been put under arrest for
meet punishment. But our governor, though ready to put
down the heathen savages with an iron hand, and with a will
and courage that knows no trembling nor hesitation, seems not
to understand the devices of Satan and the dangerous workings
of heresies on a people, and so is timid and doubtful in
these matters.”

“Then you, Deacon, must be the man to move in the
matter of these crying abominations.”

“I suppose I must; for duty is duty, and seeing wherein it
ought to be done, I should not, it may be, shrink from the

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

doing thereof. And you, brother Dummer, must take hold
with me.”

“The Lord helping me, I will not be laggard; but whither
more particularly pointeth the finger of duty among the multitude
of offenses requiring the hand of correction?”

“I have already hinted what should be done with those
steeped in damnable heresies, like the man Williams and his
confederating disciples. There is another class that I consider
even more dangerous—I mean that pestilent sect called Quakers.
There is a law still in force requiring the branding of
them—boring with hot irons their tongues, which had uttered
false doctrines—whipping them from town to town on their
way to banishment, and the inflicting of the just penalty of
death if they returned. That wholesome law was once commendably
executed, and the land was blessed accordingly.
But now, in our guilty remissness, it has become but little
better than a dead letter. Quakers, and even returned Quakers,
I grieve to say, walk among us unmolested.”

“Yea, Deacon, I greatly fear this thing is so.”

“But what would you say of one who was both heretic and
Quaker, or at least was deeply tainted with their abominable
doctrines?”

“I should say of him, anathema maranatha, and count it a
God-bounden duty to move against him.”

“And yet, such an one, as I know, through the praise-worthy
faithfulness of our trusty, albeit sometimes a little irregular
brother, Dick Swain, appeared in the streets this very
morning, and openly took sides with the heathen prisoners,
and reviled our rulers. And then, to add to his contumacy
and wicked intent, the fellow unblushingly went to the side
of Williams, and prompted and aided him through the trial,
in perverting the evidence unto the defeating of justice and
judgment.”

“Surely that were a grievous offence. But, who is he?”

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

“A youngerly, but very froward fellow, called Vane Willis,
from some place out of town, though often here, it is thought,
and I fear with no good design. In truth, I have the most
painful surmises, that he is trying to tamper with some who
have been especially placed under godly influences, and the
protecting care of the Christian household. You well knew our
worthy sister, in the Lord, the widow Southworth, who left us
a few months ago?”

“Surely, I did,—a godly woman, eschewing all false doctrines,
and full of spiritual obedience.”

“You knew, likewise,” resumed the Deacon, drawing near
the other, and speaking lower, “that this family, on the fleeing
of her unfortunate husband, afterwards slain by salvages
no doubt, was put under my sole charge and guardianship,
which I discharged to the great satisfaction of our duty doing
sister, who always depended on me for advice in all that
related to the spiritual and temporal affairs of herself and her
daughter, now left behind her. But that daughter is not
like her mother in many things, being more inclined to doubts
in some of the matters of sound doctrines, as I have thought I
sometimes perceived, and less inclined to give ear to wholesome
counsel. Now her mother and I both labored to get
her into the fold of the church; but failing in that, we, at
length, fully agreed on betrothing her to my nephew, Timothy
Sniffkin, for her temporal advantage and spiritual safety, and
then, when her mother was taken away, I invited her to
take up her residence at my house, knowing that then she
would not have there any proper protectors; but she seemed
strangely perverse in all these matters. Now I greatly fear
that this pestilent fellow that I spoke of, with whom she confesses
to some acquaintance, has had some hand in her perverseness.”

“Heinous! how heinous, if so!” said the shocked Dummer,—
“I see,—I see the thoughtless and straying lamb of our flock is

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

to be saved from the devouring wolf. But, the means,—the
means, Deacon?”

“In my holy anxieties, I have pondered the thing diligently,
and have hit upon a course. As a first step, I would
have you to-morrow go and labor with her, with counsel and
prayer, to induce her to come into the sacred fold. Peradventure,
with my backing, she will listen; and the path will
then be opened to almost certain success. Meanwhile, we
must narrowly watch the base beguiler. If he is a Quaker,
as Dick thinks it is clearly certain he is, then—”

Sharp outcries, and the sounds of hurrying footsteps in
the street, here cut short the conference of these worthies,
who, running to the window, soon gathered from the hurrying
passers, that a man, supposed to be Dick Swain, had
been seized by some of King Philip's crew, just outside the
town, and carried off; when the Deacon and his Shadow
snatched up their hats and joined the throng rushing on to
the rescue.

p719-093 CHAPTER V.

“O luve will venture in whaur it daur na weel be seen.”

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

The alarm mentioned at the close of the last chapter, had
proceeded from the loud cry of “Help! help! Indians! Indians!”
heard rising from some point in the bushy pine plain
swelling up from the rear of the village. On almost any
previous evening, no general alarm probably would have been
thus created; for the person or persons hearing the outcry,
would have fearlessly gone alone to the spot indicated by the
noise, to see what was wanted. But on this evening, so
deeply excited and apprehensive had all classes become, from
witnessing the spectacles of the day, and hearing of the attendant
omens, that those whose ears the cry had reached, instead
of proceeding to the place, had turned and ran the other way
into the village, spreading the alarm through the streets, and
then facing round to lead those whom they had thus rallied
out, to the locality of the supposed trouble. And on rushed
the confused throng,—the Deacon, the Shadow, and all, each
armed with a musket, old sword, pitchfork, hoe, cudgel, or
such other defensive implement as most readily came to
hand.

“There! it was somewhere about here that I was passing
when I heard the outcry, and the sound came out from those
low scattering pines,” exclaimed the man that had led the
way, stopping in an open field a little beyond the last house
on that border of the village, and pointing to a line of scattering
bushes about forty rods ahead.

[figure description] Page 089.[end figure description]

“Let us form a line and advance then,” cried one of the
more resolute of the company.

“Wouldn't it be meet on this alarming occasion first to
have a prayer?” asked the Shadow, in a quavering voice, beginning
to raise his shaking hands to suit the action to the
word.

“Stay a little, brother Dummer,” interposed Deacon Mudgridge;
“let us first collect our minds and reason together on
the matter. And firstly, is there any certainty as to the man
thus boldly snatched from our midst by the audacious salvages?”

“Why, I thought to be sure, that the voice sounded greatly
like unto the voice of Dick Swain,” responded the man who
had first spoken.

“He is right,” sung out Sniffkin, who had prudently
stopped some half dozen rods in the background, but was now
venturing considerably nearer. “He is undoubtedly in the
right about it, for I have reason to know myself, that Dick
Swain is the man. But it will be of no avail to go into the
woods after him. There is, likely enough, at this very moment,
a whole line of hostile Indians lying in ambush in yonder
pines to cover the retreat of the miscreant abductors, who, no
doubt, are now far on the way to King Philip's camp, and I
pretty well know who is at the head of them.”

“Things being so,” after a long pause, began the Deacon,
who seemed to comprehend the allusions of Sniffkin, and who
had been casting about for a decent excuse for backing out
himself—“things being so, and it sometimes being but a
wrongful tempting of Providence to rush into the dangers
where our righteous indignation would carry us, I would
rather counsel, lest we act without due consideration, that we
all now return to the meeting-house yard, for a more fitting
consultation, wherein the conclusion, peradventure, may be

[figure description] Page 090.[end figure description]

arrived at to recommend the calling out of our brisk company
of armed troopers.”

This motion being eagerly seconded by the Shadow and
Sniffkin, was soon unanimously carried, when the crowd, now
promptly led forward by the last named brave personage, all
took their way to the meeting-house, many of them evidently
breathing much easier than when on their outward march towards
the suspicious thickets where the luckless Dick had
so strangely disappeared.

But leaving this excited assemblage to their discussions respecting
the fate of Dick Swain, and the most advisable steps
to be taken for his rescue, we will now take the reader to a
scene enacting in another part of the village, which will, perhaps,
sufficiently elucidate the pretty little fright of the Puritan
populace which we have been describing, and, at the same
time, develope another step in the progress of our eventful
story.

In a somewhat secluded location, on a different border of
the town, stood, at this period, a substantial dwelling-house,
so constructed as very happily to combine, in the general appearance,
the architectural characteristics of the best class of
English cottages with those of the American farm house. Although
not a very ancient building, it was yet old enough to
have allowed time, since its construction, for the full growth
of the well arranged shrubbery that embowered it. Standing
back some distance from the road, it was enclosed by the long,
shaded yard in front, a garden on one side, a fruit orchard on
the other; and extensive cultivated fields extending all along
the rear. Along the front of the house ran a wide verandah,
which was enveloped in a cloud of clustering vines in full foliage,
through which, at the particular hour we have chosen for the
introduction of the reader to the scene at hand, a small light,
from one of the front rooms, was fitfully gleaming. In that
room, and by that light, placed on a small table standing near

[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

an open window, sat the now sole mistress of the establishment,
a dark-eyed girl of about twenty. She was attired in
the habiliments usually worn by the wealthier of her sex, but
which, on her finely turned figure, were made to appear, as dress
ever will on some persons, to unusual advantage. She held in
her hand a richly bound old volume, from which she occasionally
raised her eyes and turned her head to listen—sometimes,
it was evident from the wondering and puzzled expression
that for the moment rested on her beauteous features,
to the distant noises of the tumult in the streets, and
sometimes, it was equally evident from very different expressions
of countenance, for the nearer sounds of the footsteps of
some expected visitor. Presently those sounds appeared to
strike upon her quickened senses. She started, and while
her whole heart seemed jumping into her kindling cheeks,
rose, advanced a step towards the door, and stood expectant.
The next moment, the young marksman who had left the
crowd in the street so abruptly, an hour or two before, stood
in the entrance, with looks that spoke a gratification which
his tongue would have in vain tried to utter.

“The brightest of good evenings to you, Madian,” he said,
respectfully extending his hand.

“And as pleasant an one to you, Sir Vane, if I am to let
you off without a scolding for calling on a lady at nearly ten
o'clock in the evening,” she replied, accepting the proffered
hand with a sort of half bantering, half serious air. “But
now you are here, you may be seated and tarry long enough to
answer me a question or two. Our serving-man, Taffy, has
been out to witness the public proceedings, and has informed
me what occurred during the day. But I would inquire
what has happened this evening, to cause so much commotion
in the streets?”

“Oh, nothing, or nothing very alarming, I think, Madian.”

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

“Nothing! Then they made much ado about nothing, it
appears to me.”

“They did—much more than I expected.”

“Expected! Why, was it about something of your own
moving that you could go into a calculation of its effects on
the populace?”

“How sharp you are upon me to-night, Madian!”

“Ah! you look roguish, sir—you stand suspected—yes,
convicted, nearly, of something, I know not what—now confess,
sir, that your punishment may be the lighter.”

“Well, Madian, as you certainly should have some excuse
from me for delaying to this unseasonable hour the call that
Taffy doubtless told you I proposed to make this evening, I
may as well give you the true one, and especially so as it may
concern you to know it.”

“Proceed; prithee, proceed, sir.”

“Taffy perhaps told you of my bout with Sniffkin this
morning, at target shooting, and afterwards at word shooting?”

“He did; and I could not but fear that you gave him as
much advantage over you in the latter, as you gained over him
in the former, for I think he will be likely to try to turn your
bold language to your detriment.”

“Be it so, then; for it is not in me, Madian, to hold my
peace under false accusations, much less if they come in the
shape of insulting insinuations. Nor will any fear of the
Plymouth regency deter me from expressing my disapprobation
of a course of policy which I feel to be so certainly hazardous
to the peace and safety of this colony. But that is not what I
was about to tell you. Soon after this bloody day's work was
over, I started out to come here, when I fell in with a crowd
in the street discussing the matter of the execution, which,
now it is over, seems to have filled the fickle people, who were
at first so urgent in getting up this mad proceeding, with great

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

fears for the consequence. Here also I found Sniffkin and
his tools, who all assailed me again. I was, however, determined
I would, this time, have no altercation with them, and
so walked off and was proceeding on my way, when I soon
found myself dogged by Dick Swain; and having, as I glanced
back on my retreat from the crowd, detected Sniffkin whispering
some directions to Dick, I readily comprehended the
object, and so contrived up a little scheme to defeat it.”

“Yes, but what was the object of dogging you?”

“To see whether I came here, Madian,” replied the young
man, bending an earnest, significant look upon the other.

“So that is the way,” responded the spirited girl, with her
thin nostrils distending, and her black eyes flashing with suppressed
indignation—“so that is the way, then, they would
treat the guests I choose to admit here! Well, perhaps I have
no right at all in the house my father left me! But go on
with your account of this nice affair.”

“Yes. Well, I then altered my course, proceeded to the
border of the pine barrens, where two of my red friends who
had come on with me to the trial were encamped, pointed out
to them the dogging tool still lurking in the distance, and
directed them, when I should have decoyed him along against
them, to rush out, gently take him in tow, lead him a mile
into the woods, detain him an hour or two, and let him go.
Standing in a neighboring copse, all this I saw done—heard
his uproarious outcry of `Murder! Indians!' &c., as they
drew him into the bushes; then, soon after, to my surprise
and vexation, I perceived half the town rushing in wild alarm
to the spot, when, after listening from my covert to the consultation
of the valorous pursuers of the supposed abducting
Indians, as they drew up in a line at a safe distance from the
wood, and hearing them, at the suggestion of Sniffkin and
Deacon Mudgridge, decide to return to the meeting-house to
hold a council of war, I took my way by a round-about path

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

very quietly hitherward, to fulfil an appointment, if not too
late, which it would have grieved me much to have been
choused out of, but even more to have kept it in a way that
would have added to the embarrassments of my fair entertainer.”

A low, silvery peal of merry laughter burst from the lips
of Madian, as the narrator closed his account of the night
alarm, which had so awakened her curiosity; but she made no
other comment than by asking,

“But will not this Dick Swain suspect who was the instigator
of his odd abduction?

“No, I think not. It was so managed that he could see
no signs of any communications between me and the Indians,
who were made to go round in the bushes so as to appear
to rush upon him from a different direction from the line he
and I were taking.”

“What then will the affair end in?”

“Smoke. They have contrived to let him escape, by this
time, and probably he is now back to the meeting-house, announcing
to the crazy crowd his marvelous escape, which he
will doubtless swear he effected by disabling a good half-dozen
of Philip's warriors. And to-morrow you will hear his
exploits, I presume, bruited from mouth to mouth through
the town.”

“I hope, all the events of this day will result in no worse
consequences.”

“I hope it, certainly, but hope against conviction. For
I feel that the fatal die has this day been cast.”

“Then you count on the approach of troubles for us all?”

“I do, Madian, I am deeply impressed with the apprehension,
that times are at hand such as the people of this colony
have never seen. Indeed, I feel so certain of it, that I am
about to enter on immediate preparations, so that when the

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

storm of war shall burst, as it doubtless will soon, and suddenly,
it shall not find all unprepared and helpless.”

“Surely, Mr. Willis, you cannot be anxious to plunge, uncalled
by the rulers, into the perils of a savage warfare?”

“If such as I am do not come forward, to stand between
the helpless of our unguarded homes and the exasperated savages,
who will be likely to do so, or do it in a manner which
can only be effectual? The court of Plymouth, and those
they will be likely to appoint to lead their troops to battle,
know little or nothing of the modes of Indian warfare,
and before they will have learned by experience, hundreds of
families may perish. I shall ask no appointment of them,
while they remain under their present influences; but, Madian,
I must go.”

“What, alone, and single handed?”

“No—in anticipation of this crisis, I have already talked
over the matter with a few of the young men, who entertain
my views, and who would not hesitate, they say, to follow
where I would lead. And I am thinking, therefore, to organize
a select band of volunteers to be ready for the emergency.
But if I do this at all, I should do so immediately; for as I
look upon affairs, every moment's delay may be fraught with
peril. And within this very hour, therefore, I shall be on my
way to Boston, to enlist from that colony some I know there,
whom I would like to have with me, in the proposed service.”

“To-night? O Vane Willis, Vane Willis, how your words
pain me!”

“It must be so, Madian. It is a patriotic duty. You are
the daughter of one who was reputed a brave soldier, and
can better appreciate than many others, perhaps my feelings
and motives. Yes, dear Madian, I must go; but before I
leave you, to see you I know not when again, I would carry
with me some comforting pledge that you—”

“Why, you know already, Vane—how can you but know,

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

on whom my choice will fall, if I can be left free to make it?
You are agoing to fight battles abroad, I remain to fight battles
at home. If we both come out conquerors, and ever live to
behold the light of peace again—”

“Then I have your promise?”

“I know not what I ought to say, Vane, and yet I know
not what to say, but yes.”

“It is settled and sealed then. But, Madian, cannot you
give me some token of this our plighted faith, to look upon
when alone in the wilderness, to give me strength and hope in
the hour of battle?”

Madian dropped her head a moment in thought, when
starting up with an animated look, she begged to be excused
for a brief absence, and hastily left the room. In another
minute she appeared, bearing in her hand a richly mounted
rapier, whose blue bright Damascus blade gleamed in the light
like a polished diamond.

“Here,” said she, pausing before her wondering lover,—
“here is the trusty blade that was worn on many a hard fought
field by Col. Richard Southworth, in the voluntary service of
his idolized master, the lion-hearted Oliver Cromwell of England.
On whom can his daughter more fittingly bestow it,
than on one who also voluntarily proposes to encounter no
less perils for the public safety? Vane Willis,” she added,
holding up the blade with both hands, and imprinting an
ardent kiss on its burnished side, “Vane Willis, this is yours;
and I pass it to your hands, consecrated by the love of the
giver. Keep it, and with her ever-attending prayers, and in
her name, as the last representative of a brave warrior, and in
the name of that true man, Sir Henry Vane, whose name you
in part bear, use it worthily. And may heaven bless and
watch over you. But now go—in mercy, go; I can bear this
no longer. Adieu, adieu!”

And the proud, but deeply moved maiden hurried him to

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

the door, and scarcely waiting to receive his parting words,
turned to hide her gushing tears, and fled to her chamber.

It is now time that we should pause in the action of the
story to give the reader a more particular account of the family
last introduced, than he or she can have learned from what
has been said of them in the preceding pages.

Col. Richard Southworth, a man of wealth and family, was
at the opening of the revolution, which resulted in the overthrow
of the British monarchy, in 1642, a resident of the
banks of the Severn, in the west of England. In religion a
puritan, and in politics a follower of the noble Hampden, or
something still more republican, he was among the first to
take arms against the infatuated Charles and his corrupt advisers,
in their reckless attempt to subvert the constitutional
liberties of the people. And having entered Cromwell's noted
regiment as a captain, he displayed so much devotion to the
cause, and such gallantry in deeds enacted under the searching
eye of his daring leader, that he was soon promoted to the
next succeeding military grades. And, when that great leader,
through the force of his overtowering genius and energy, rose
to the post of commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary army,
the well-tried Southworth was placed at the head of his regiment—
a regiment which had already laid the foundation of
its old master's fortunes, and which, for high discipline and
unwavering courage, has rarely been equalled by any other
body of troops in the world.

In the great struggle that now ensued, Richard Southworth,
with his invincible regiment, became the scourge and terror
of the quailing monarchists, by the irresistible fury of his
charges in battle, and in the untiring perseverance of his
efforts everywhere to crush and destroy them. But no sooner
had he seen his revered leader and pattern firmly seated in
authority, with the prostrate royalists at his feet, than he
sought, and at length obtained the reluctantly granted

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

permission to retire from the army, to the enjoyments of private
life on his estate, only replying to the earnest solicitations of
Cromwell to take posts of honor and profit under his government,
by saying that he had seen all the desires of his heart
satisfied in the downfall of the hated Stuarts, and in the elevation
of a God-appointed ruler, who could be safely trusted
with the rights of the people.

With the exception of an occasional visit to the court of
Cromwell, the colonel, having married and settled down on
his estate, now maintained a life of seclusion during the whole
rule of his beloved sovereign, evidently contented with his
quiet pursuits, and well satisfied with the situation of public
affairs. But on the death of Cromwell, he immediately became
distrustful and uneasy, for he had the sagacity to perceive
that with the departure of the controlling spirit of its
great champion, the life and soul of the anti-monarchical party
in England had gone also, and that in the amiable and yielding
Richard, now succeeding to his father's authority, the
ever secretly plotting, and now hopeful royalists would find
an unconscious instrument to help them again into power.
The advent of the latter contingency would, with his settled
convictions and unbending disposition, render his further residence
in England insupportable, and probably be as dangerous
to him personally as it would be repugnant to his feelings.
Having taken this view of the subject, he soon formed a new
plan for his future; and with his accustomed promptitude,
proceeded immediately to execute it.

In pursuance of his scheme, he lost no time in converting
his whole property into available funds, and preparing to leave
the country. And with so much energy did he prosecute the
object in view, that within three months he had made everything
ready for the departure of himself and family. When
taking his wife and only child, the spirited little Madian, together
with a trusty Welch couple, who, man and wife,

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

without children, had lived some years with the family in the
capacity of servants, and were still willing to follow its fortunes,
he proceeded in a private manner to the coast, and
took passage to Holland. And within another month, having
safely deposited the larger part of his funds in the bank at
Amsterdam, and everything else there favoring his projects,
he and his family were on their way to America.

Having arrived in Boston, and tarried a few days with a
relation of Mrs. Southworth, they proceeded to Plymouth, to
which the Puritans in Holland had very naturally, from their
greater knowledge of the colony settled there, directed the
attention of the colonel as the most desirable for a permanent
settlement. Here, when it became known that he was a Puritan
and a man of means, he was kindly received, and assisted
in the purchase of the best tract of land to be had adjoining
the village. Of this, the independent new emigrant took
immediate possession, put the land under a thorough system
of cultivation, and at once commenced building the dwelling-house
which we have described, and in which, so rapidly was
the work prosecuted, he had the pleasure of seeing himself
and family, in a few months more, quietly ensconced, and
settled down, as he supposed, for a peaceful and unmolested
future; for having seen in the old world enough of bloody
strife and political bitterness and wrangling, in the former of
which he had only engaged from a stern sense of duty, while
in the latter he never would take part, he now had no favors
to ask of the public, except to be left to his own private pursuits,
and the free enjoyment of his own opinions. But
before he had been many months in the country, he discovered
entirely contrary to what he expected to find here, that,
in the matter of religious doctrines, at least, he could not
speak and act as he pleased, without being taken to task by
the straight going churchmen, who here had control, and who
required that the opinions of all others should be squared by

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

their own. He had himself often risked his life in battle, in
a good part to secure the immunities of religious freedom; he
knew that his old sovereign, Oliver Cromwell, had ever tolerated
a diversity of religious belief. And for a while, he
could not conceive how men, who had suffered so much from
persecution themselves, and periled so much for the right
to worship in their own way, could ever become the persecutors
of others for claiming the same privilege. But at length
he found too much reason to believe that.

Colonel Southworth had, while in England, several times
listened to the burning eloquence of the celebrated George Fox,
the founder of Quakerism, and had become deeply impressed
with the truth and moral beauty of many parts of his creed,
and finding, on his arrival in this country, that the Quakers
here were undergoing the most bitter persecutions for no
other crime than their belief, he hesitated not openly to condemn
the course of the colony towards them. This soon
brought upon him the denunciations of the church, which, instead
of awing him into silence, only made him the more bold
and determined in the defence of the persecuted. And still
persisting in his course, he, in a short time, was accounted a
Quaker himself, prescribed and put upon the list of those
against whom a decree of banishment had been procured.
And the decree would have doubtless been immediately enforced
upon him with the same promptitude, with which it
was upon others, but for the intercession of a few friends, or
those who had chosen to call themselves such, among the
church of Plymouth, who gained for him a short respite.
The chief of these intercessors was Mudgridge, who, from the
first, had taken great pains to ingratiate himself into the

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

Colonel's favor, and who now, by this act of seeming friendship,
and by pretending to sympathize with him, instead of
trying to reform him, as he had promised the church, succeeded
in completely gaining his confidence. Mudgridge
then, though then youngerly and comparatively poor, was yet
a very active and ambitious member of the church; and he
had the address by frequently making encouraging reports of
his progress in rescuing the Colonel from his heresies, to keep
him along on sufferance nearly a year, and until an event occurred
which made all efforts of that kind unnecessary.

The restoration of the Stuarts in the person of the despicable
Charles II. had now nearly two years been effected in England.
Those who had had anything to do with the trial and
execution of Charles I. had been summarily condemned to
death, and all executed, except the three so-called regicides,
who escaped to America—Goff, Whaley, and Dixon. But
with the death of this class of men, the royal vengeance was
not satisfied. Others, like Hugh Peters and Sir Henry Vane,
who were accounted influential promoters of the revolution,
were, from time to time, added to the list of the doomed, till
the early career of Colonel Southworth was in some way called
to mind, when he, too, was condemned to death, his abode
ferreted out, and a warrant, with a large reward for his apprehension,
was, as before in the case of the three regicides, forwarded
to Boston. Luckily, however, a friend in that city
got an intimation of the arrival of the warrant before it reached
the hands of the officers, and despatched a messenger to the
prescribed Colonel, who, on receiving the timely warning, instantly
commenced preparations for immediate flight. But
with whom should he entrust the charge of property and family?
Between himself and his wife, a cold, incapable, rigid
religionist, there had long been but few intermingling sympathies,
and in business affairs, no community of knowledge.
As he grew more liberal, she grew more bigoted; and since

[figure description] Page 102.[end figure description]

he had fallen under the displeasure of the church, whose
opinions with her were both law and gospel, she had actually
sided with them against him. She knew little of the situation
and extent of his property, except that he owned his present
establishment, and had sufficient money in the house to last
the family, with the profits of the farm, several years to come.
For these reasons combined, he resolved to place the charge
of his whole affairs in the hands of another. And the person
selected for this purpose, was, as might be expected, his confidential
friend, Mudgridge, who was immediately summoned;
when the two spent most of the night closeted together in consultation,
the result of which was that all the colonel's property
here, and paper evidences of funded property abroad, with
authority to draw the latter as needed, was placed in the
hands of Mudgridge, in trust for the sole use and benefit of
his family, over whom he was also to have the oversight and
virtual guardianship, unrestrained, as it very naturally happened,
in the hurry and anxieties of the moment, by either
witnesses or written guaranties for the faithful discharge of the
important trust.

As soon as these hasty arrangements were made, the proscribed
patriot filled a pack with clothing, took a good supply
of coin, bid his family a hurried farewell, and under cover of
the night departed for some undecided destination to the
westward. The next day the officers of justice made their
appearance, and scoured the country, far and wide, in pursuit
of the fugitive; but wholly in vain. For several months,
nothing was heard of him by any one. But at length Mudgridge
received a letter from him, brought by an uncommunicative
Indian, from some unrevealed locality, and saying that,
“resting, as he now was, under a double ban, for the rightful
assertion of his principles in England, and the honest
expression of his religious views here in the colonies, he had
become thoroughly disgusted with the conduct of his race,

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

and it would be very doubtful whether he should ever again
make his appearance in any so called civilized community;”
and that “he neither cared for, nor wanted any more property
than he had with him. Let all that go to his family, who
need take no further thought of him.” In this way matters
rested some time longer; when some hunters, who had come
across the wilderness from Connecticut river brought word
that they had learned on their way, from the Indians, that the
white man who had run away from Plymouth, the year before,
and who, from the description given of him, could be no other
than Colonel Southworth, had died of sickness, a few weeks
before, and had been buried by the Indian family with whom
he had been living.

From this time, Mudgridge became the sole supervisor and
undisputed director of all the affairs of the Southworth family.
And from this time, also his own circumstances in life commenced
a great and rapid amendment. House after house,
for renting, to say nothing of his own costly mansion, were,
during the next ten years, seen going up under his directions;
and farm after farm were added to his fast spreading domains,
till he was accounted by all, the richest man in the place.
All this was attributed to his commendable business sagacity,
and the blessings that followed his Christian virtues, the last
of which had long since made him a Deacon in the church,
and now one of the most influential men in the colony.

And in this manner, affairs continued to go on till the
death of Mrs. Southworth, which occurred the winter before
the time we have chosen for the opening of our story. The
Deacon had succeeded to his entire satisfaction in getting along
with the widow. But the daughter, who was now grown to
womanhood, he had long since perceived, was altogether a
different person, both in intellect and disposition; and with
him it appeared to become a great object that she should have
the right kind of husband. His nephew, Timothy Sniffkin,

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

had therefore been imported the year before, from the neighboring
colony, but with what success will better be shown in
the progress of the tale.

Having thus in a digression, far more extended than we at
first proposed to ourself, given a history of the remarkable
fortunes of the family we had introduced, we will now resume
the thread of our narrative.

p719-110 CHAPTER VI.

“Was this religion pure and undefiled?
Was this religion for a little child?
Can tender, trembling spirits thus be driven,
By whips of living scorpions into heaven?”

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

The next morning, as Madian Southworth sat at her window
pensively revolving in mind the tender passages that had occurred
between her and her gallant lover, at their last night's
interview, the whole of which now seemed to her so sweet, so
entrancing, and so transient did it appear, more like the
bright and fleeting representations of a dreaming fancy than
a tangible reality, her eye caught a glimpse, through the clustering
shrubbery, of the tall, stooping figure of the Shadow entering
the front gate, and approaching the house. She slightly
started, and a sort of recoiling shudder seemed to pass over
her; for, as the grating sounds of his slow, solemn tread upon
the graveled pathway fell upon her ear, she instinctively felt
that his early visit had something to do with the subject of her
thoughts, and the new born, and, as yet, almost ethereal ties,
which her heart rose up jealously to guard against the rude
touch of all others, whether the opposing or the careless.
Soon schooling herself into composure however, she respectfully
saluted Dummer as he entered, and invited him to a
seat, in which, after sundry awkward flourishes and sprawling
movements of his long, ungainly limbs, he at length became
pretty fairly settled. The native dignity of Madian, now
made the more imposing, by the cool reserve with which her
demeanor had become involuntary invested, very evidently

[figure description] Page 106.[end figure description]

discomposed the intruding zealot, and it was some moments
before he could get his thoughts sufficiently in working order
to open upon the matter of his mission.

“I came,” he at last rather falteringly began—“I came—
the best friends of the family thereunto consenting and advising—
to hold friendly communion and kindly counsel with
the daughter of our late well-beloved sister Southworth, in
matters pertaining to her spiritual welfare.”

“Indeed, sir,” responded Madian, in a sort of non-committal,
enquiring tone.

“Yea, young woman; for, in our holy anxieties for the
spiritual safety of one, who is now left without any proper
Christian guide in the family, and therefore continually liable
to be deceived and led astray by the Evil one, who watcheth
by day and by night to seduce the young and unwary by his
manifold devices, we of the household of faith are filled with
a very great desire—yea, with inexpressible yearnings, to see
you come into the sacred fold.”

“Perhaps I should be thankful, sir, for so much attention
to my condition, if it be attended with the perils you intimate.
But let me ask if the fold you speak of is the same as the one
in which, as I have been told, was once originated a decree for
banishing my father from his home and family, only for disapproving
of the persecutions of the harmless Quakers?”

“You are in grievous error, young woman. The Quakers
are not a harmless sect, but schismatic and pestilent, the
spreaders of false doctrines and dangerous heresies. And
your father, if not one of them, did commit a heinous offence
in upholding them, as he himself did admit and confess, as I was
told by Deacon Mudgridge. And hence, on account of his
repentance, he was graciously spared the banishment you
mentioned.”

“I have never before heard of any such repentance on his
part. And as he was not driven from his home, as it had

[figure description] Page 107.[end figure description]

been intended, I had supposed that the repentance must
have been on the part of the movers of that Christian measure.”

“The movers repent! the church guilty of repentance,
young woman! verily thou talkest like one of the unregenerate
whereas thou art reputed to have been piously inclined, disagreeing
with us only in the matters of sound doctrines. But
this questioning of the doings of the elect betokeneth, I
greatly fear me, that there is still a chain of hell about thy
neck, drawing thee away unto all sorts of Sadducisms and
heresies. And I feel it my God-bounden duty to warn thee
of thy situation. By the terrors of the law, persuade we men
unto repentance. Wherefore I speak unto thee as one in the
gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity—as one in danger
of being given over to the buffeting of Sathan, and at once
snatched away to that awful hell of everlasting burnings where
the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. O repent
ye, repent, and straightway come out from among the workers
of iniquity, lest the terrible Avenger of sin come like a thief
in the night speedily upon thee for thy awful contumacy, and
the righteous wrath of an offended Heaven fall quickly on thy
guilty head, and utterly consume thee, like stubble in the
fiery furnace, which may God in his mercy avert.—Let us
pray.”

Before the astonished maiden had time to utter, had she
felt disposed to do so, one word in self-defence, or in deprecation
of this storm of crimination and warning, which she had
so inadvertently brought down upon her own head, the excited
zealot had thrown himself upon his knees, and began to pour
forth the loud, wordy torrent of one of his most heated invocations.
And now feeling relieved from the disquieting effects
of the calm, searching looks he had been compelled to encounter,
and taking advantage of the privilege usually accorded
to this exercise—that of being permitted to utter,

[figure description] Page 108.[end figure description]

unquestioned, whatever may best subserve the purposes of the speaker,
he redoubled his efforts to frighten and overawe the fair object
of his holy onset. By a long and terrible tirade on the enormity
of her sins of commission and omission, he prayed her to
the depths of hell, and then, by a pretended wrestling and
wrangling with the Almighty, to snatch from him the victim
as a reward for his assumed faith, he prayed her out again;
and finally he prayed her into the church, where, in a sort of
prophetic rhapsody he claimed he now clearly beheld her;
and thereupon fell into shouts of thanksgiving to God that
she was at last safely placed beyond the reach of the snares
and devices of the devil in hell, and all his schismatic, Quaker,
heretic, and false-doctrine spreading emissaries on earth.

Having thus brought to a close his desperate effort for
driving Madian into the church, in part performance of the
plan which he and the Deacon had the evening before concocted,
the Shadow now rose with a self-satisfied air; when,
without adding a word by way of retiring civility, lest it
might weaken the effect of a performance, which, if left to work
its full power on her mind, could not fail, he thought, soon to
result in the desired consummation, he demurely took his hat
and departed to report progress to his great exemplar.

Madian scarcely knew what to make of this strange visit of
one with whom she had not the honor of hardly a passing acquaintance,
and still less of the stranger manner in which he
had conducted it. She had early been deeply impressed with
all the generally received tenets of the Christian faith, and
sincerely loved and admired the pure and simple teachings of
the Evangelists, and those of St. John more than the rest,
because they breathed more particularly through the whole
of them, that trustful and childlike love to her God and
Savior, which was so much in unison with the feelings of her
own heart, and which, she felt, was all the religion she possessed.
At that period, she might have sought admission to

[figure description] Page 109.[end figure description]

the church, had she deemed herself worthy. But viewing
that establishment through the bigoted eyes of her mother,
she esteemed it too pure, exalted, and infallible to make it
proper to receive into fellowship one so unworthy as herself.
But as she became older, and began to see with her own eyes,
and reflect for herself, she witnessed such a want of what she
thought to be the requirement of Christian charity in the
church, as then conducted; so much intolerance, as exhibited
particularly in the case of her father, which she had begun to
call to mind and investigate, and so much wrangling and disputation
about the niceties of doctrines—all which she felt to be
distracting her mind and dampening her heart's devotion, that
she at length lost all desire to become one of them; fearing,
indeed, if she did so, that not only whatever of the Christian
spirit she possessed would be smothered in the profitless polemics
then in vogue among all church members, but that on
account of their intolerant notions, she should find herself
among those who would not be likely long to extend her their
fellowship, and to whom she certainly could not extend full
fellowship herself.

These views she had not latterly hesitated to express openly,
and for this reason, the visit of Dummer, coming with the
avowed object of urging her to join the church, had taken her
by surprise. She could not understand, and the more she
reflected, the more was she at a loss to comprehend, why the
church or any of its members should desire her to take a step
which, according to her views, should be entirely voluntary,
and which, if not so, would be little less than a sacrilege.
Yes, why should such a measure be urged upon her, especially
just now, unless there was ulterior and unworthy motives somewhere
at the bottom of the movement? What that motive
was, and by whom, and with what object entertained, she believed
she knew; but what she had as yet witnessed was not
sufficient to reduce her conjecture to a certainty. She

[figure description] Page 110.[end figure description]

theerfore resolved to keep her own counsel, act with prudence, and
wait for further developments.

And for such developments, she was not kept long in
waiting.

The next day, a good and pious matron of the village paid
her a formal visit, during which the lady urgently advised
Madian, not only for her own good, but as the means of more
extended usefulness, to make a public profession of religion.
And this was followed up on the day succeeding that, by
another female church member, who urged, as an additional
reason for the step recommended, that it would be a safeguard
against the scandals which otherwise would be likely to get
into circulation against a lone and unprotected young lady.
On the next day to that, she had to entertain yet another visitor
on the same errand; and on yet the next, two, both evidently
freighted with similar loving duties, to be discharged
towards the persecuted Madian. And so it continued through
the week; when Deacon Mudgridge himself, by way of bringing
up the rear, was seen, towards night, leisurely approaching
the house.

To all these besiegers, Madian had thus far given very civil
though rather evasive answers. But having, while so treating
the subject with them, succeeded in fishing out from one and
another of them enough to satisfy herself who was either directly
or indirectly the moving spirit of their conjoint labors
of love and duty, she resolved, that she would now, if the
Deacon gave her an opportunity, bring the matter to an
eclaircissement; for she began to tire under an appliance which
she felt to be as insulting to her, as she was determined to
make it useless to all others.

The persistent Deacon, consequently, found her, evidently
much to his surprise and vexation after what had been done,
a very intractable subject. And when, after he had paddled
round to the point, and repeated the proposition which his

[figure description] Page 111.[end figure description]

emissaries had made before him, and which he now put in the
form of a request, savoring much of the air of a command; when
she told him respectfully, but decidedly, that she must be her
own judge in the matter, and decide for herself when, and
whether ever, she should seek admission into his church or
any other, he seemed greatly disturbed, shook his head
gravely, and solemnly throwing his white pig eyes upward, in
seeming ejaculation, muttered something about “a lost sheep
of Israel.”

For some time he appeared quite determined not to give up
beat in this important preliminary to success in his main object,
after taking so much pains to pave the way for its accomplishment;
and he returned again and again to the charge.
But finding himself completely foiled in every new attempt,
he at length appeared to be convinced of the uselessness of
further effort in that direction, and soon evidently made up
his mind that he might as well now as ever, hazard the
chances of the main assault.

“The Scripture,” he said, after some boggling in fixing on
the manner of introducing his subject—“the Scripture moveth
us in sundry passages thereof unto the searching out our duty
pertaining to our relations as man and woman. It is not good
for man to be alone—much less helpless woman, as we are
everywhere in the Word led to infer; hence we find Bethuel
and Laban giving their daughters to wife, when they arrived
to woman's estate. And I, standing in place of father in this
family, am minded, in sense of duty, to speak to you in the
matter of changing your condition to one more fitting, and
less encompassed with the snares that beset the young and
unwary, than the unprotected one you are now standing in.”

“But I am not at all troubled about that matter, Deacon
Mudgridge, and have no thought of changing my condition at
present,” promptly responded Madian, though not without a
slight tremor in her voice.

[figure description] Page 112.[end figure description]

“The feeling that prompteth to that is peradventure but
maiden reserve, which is not unbecoming a young woman,
albeit soon overcome, as I trust it will be in the present case,
for you are now arrived to woman's estate, and it is meet you
should have a suitable protector. In view of these things, I
confess I have for some time been exercised with many anxieties
in this behalf. Wherefore, it has given me great pleasure
to hear that my nephew, Mr. Timothy Sniffkin, has made
honorable proposal to raise you to the marriage estate.”

“I am glad, sir, the proposal gave pleasure to any one. I
am sure it did not to me.”

“Now, verily, young woman, you cannot have been so
hasty and inconsiderate as to have answered Mr. Sniffkin in
a manner savoring forwardness and opposition to his advantageous
proposal?”

“As Mr. Sniffkin has seen fit to disclose part of what occurred,
I choose that you should look to him for the rest.”

A visible frown passed over the hard, warty visage of the
Deacon, at the equivocal remark of the other, but without
deigning any direct reply to it, he proceeded:

“As the law of God and the regulating of men made in
conformity therewith, as abundantly established by the various
precedents of infallible Scripture, fully empowereth the father
to bestow the daughter on whom it may seem to him meet and
proper; and as those properly authorized to represent the father
in the matter thereto pertaining, and moreover, as Mr.
Sniffkin did not move in this thing without my knowledge,
and without my consent and approbation first fully obtained,
it remaineth only for me to say, that I expect thy acquiescence
in the measure, young woman.”

“Then, Deacon, it only remains for me to say, that you
must be sorely disappointed.”

“Nay, I am not to be disappointed in this. It is not a new
thing, the fitness whereof is now to be discussed, but one that

[figure description] Page 113.[end figure description]

has been advisedly agreed on, yea, and definitely settled,
months ago.”

“Settled, sir! How can a case, in which you make me one
of the parties, have been either settled or agreed on and I
know nothing about it?”

“Natheless, it has been settled.”

“Settled, I again ask? Settled how, and by whom?”

“Your mother and myself, perverse young woman, and that
many weeks before her lamented departure. Yea, she and I,
by fair and understanding agreement then and thereinto entering,
did betroth you to Mr. Timothy Sniffkin.”

“My mother!” almost shrieked the astonished girl. “My
mother! Impossible! I will not believe she acted such a
part, without one hint, one word of consultation with me on
the subject. No, I will never believe it, sir, till she come up
from the dead to confirm the slanderous story.”

“Woman is a weak vessel,” at length responded the relentless
Deacon, in a moderated and commiserating tone, rallying
from the surprise and momentary abashment into which the
bold reply and the bolder intimations of the aroused maiden
had thrown him—“yea, woman is verily a weak vessel, else
the word of a high and never-before-doubted officer in the
Church of God had never thus been so irreverently gainsayed.
But I am not here to bandy vain words with the perverse and
petulant on the question of my own truthfulness, or the fitness
and wisdom of your godly mother's doings, for it is not needful
that I should do either. I am here myself, and, in her
absence in another and better world, stand clothed with full
authority to act in the premises, and carry out her wishes unto
the working out of your temporal welfare.”

“You, sir? What right have you, sir, to dispose of me in
marriage without my consent? Please show me your authority
for such a strange proceeding.”

“Peradventure you will not find me wholly unprepared for

[figure description] Page 114.[end figure description]

to meet the demand, and I will forthwith do so, albeit thy
arrogancy and forwardness little deserveth my condescending
thereto,” replied the deacon, with an air of cool triumph, as
he drew out a paper, and, passing it to the other, directed her
attention to the last clause of the instrument.

The whole of it was in the hand-writing of Deacon Mudgridge,
but signed “Richard Southworth,” and in the bold,
well-known characters of the colonel's chirography; and the
clause referred to ran thus:—

“And in addition to the aforesaid appointing of the said
John Mudgridge to be sole agent and manager of my property,
I hereby appoint him also the guardian of my daughter
Madian, to be operative in case her mother should die before
she arrives at the lawful age of twenty-one, and then to hold
during her said minority.”

With paling cheeks and growing dismay, the trembling girl
slowly read the fatal paper to the end; when, spurning it from
her, she rose and stood a moment confronting her persecutor,
with a look that made him, with all his self-assurance, quail
and shrink, as some foul spirit may be supposed to do from
the rebuking gaze of an angel of light. She then turned
away with chilling dignity, and, without uttering one word of
comment or courtesy, immediately swept out of the apartment.

The disconcerted Deacon sat waiting some time, often uneasily
glancing towards the door through which Madian had
so unceremoniously departed for her expected reappearance.
But he waited in vain, and finally rose, took up his hat and
church-going cane, proceeded with a noisy tread to the front
door, and there also stood lingering a while longer, purposely
hitting his cane against the casing, and rattling the latch to
apprise her, if within hearing, that he was on the point of
going. At length finding, however, that none of these artifices
was likely to induce her to return, he reluctantly made

[figure description] Page 115.[end figure description]

his way homeward, increasing his speed, under the goadings
of his gathering vexation, every step of his progress and
fiercely muttering to himself as he went:—

“Now, who would have thought it, that she would have
broke away in such a huff? But mayhap it is better as it is,
than if I had charged her obstinate standing-out against my
plan, to her secret leanings to that pestilent Willis, as I intended,
if she had not run away, and as I still more than ever
opine to be the true reason of her contumacy. Yea, I think
it better left as now; for the prospect looks dubious enough
at that. Well, well, matters are safe enough I think, even if
this plan should miscarry. She, nor any one else now alive,
can know much about the amount of that property at the beginning,
except the farm and things visible here, which, of
course, she can have when she becomes of age. But then,
again, how much better it would be to have one of my family
and under my control placed at the head of the whole matter,
in case of doubts and contingencies sometimes strangely arising!
Then the farm itself, with the rest of the property here—
why, is not that worth bringing into my family, and keeping
within the line of the church, unto the strengthening of
God's heritage? Of a verity it is. And why can't it be secured
yet? Am I thus to be foiled and thwarted in this vile
manner, by a silly forward girl? Am I in such power in
church and state for nothing, that I must submit to such a
vexatious rebuffing at such feeble hands? And is it not all
the work of Sathan and that accursed Vane Willis? And
haven't I enough shrewdness to meet and whip both of them
on their own ground? Is it John Mudgridge that can't do
this? We'll just see— ay, by the Lord of Sabaoth, and it
shall go hard, if I don't yet see my plan, even to the last jot
and tittle, all carried out and accomplished.”

When Madian ascertained that the Deacon had fairly
made good his exit from her premises, she repaired, it

[figure description] Page 116.[end figure description]

being by that time in the dusk of the evening, to the room
where usually were found sitting, after the labors of the
day, her two faithful domestics, Taffy and Maggy; who,
though now on the downhill of life, were both vigorous and
active, and still found competent to conduct all the out-door and
in-door labors and duties of the establishment, which now, since
the death of Mrs. Southworth, more fully than ever devolved
upon them. She had often taken a seat with them when she
had no company of her own to entertain, to while away the
evenings and enjoy their society; for though their manners
and dialect still betrayed their purely Celtic origin, they were
quite shrewd and intelligent. But this evening she had a
particular motive for holding communion with them; and, in
pursuance of her object, she, after a few commonplace remarks
had been exchanged, turned to the man and said hesitatingly—

“Taffy.”

“What's your wull, my young leddy?” responded the little,
brisk old Welchman, respectfully.

“Nothing of much consequence perhaps; but I thought I
would ask you, Taffy, who do you consider to be in control
here—in other words, who do you consider mistress or master
of this establishment?”

“Who mistress of this dwalling-stead and land gear?”
asked the honest Celt, throwing a look of surprise on his idolized
young mistress,—“Why, who should it be, but my young
leddy?”

“I had rather supposed so, myself, Taffy. But Deacon
Mudgridge, I find, claims to be my guardian, as well as manager
of all the property.”

“Aweel, he's frequent speeched that to me, whan he's come
speering about the wark an' things,—an' I list to what he said respectful-like,
to plase your mother, whan live, though the
wark an' all's jist as gude done without him. But you!—

[figure description] Page 117.[end figure description]

gardian you, is it he wud? Why, what is the long-faced
carl minting at, Madian?”

“I've kenned what he's minting at, this long while,” here
interposed Maggy, glancing knowingly from her husband to
Madian. “He wants a good maik for one of his kin,—the
short-faced carl, that he got on here a-purpose. But he's
ganging for more than he'll ever get, I hope.”

“I hope so, too, Maggy,” said Madian,—“And I hope you
and Taffy will stand by me, in case of need; for I fear he intends
to make me trouble about the affair. He has got a paper,
which appears to have been signed by my father, and
which he pretends gives him authority to dispose of me as he
pleases.”

“Then he's got a paper the kurnel wud never hev writ his
name to, an' he had thocht twud force his dochter to wed agin
her free wull. That wud not be kurnel Southworth, God bless
the noble man! But he were so hastened and fashed up, in
getting away that night he so handsome chated the gallows,
the cuss't tyrants over the water thocht they had got sure made
for him, that he might not hev seen the effect of what was fixed
up for him to sign by that cunning church carl, that has so
much preach about the dervices of Sathan. It might be that
same, or it might be some tother way the thing got fixed so;
the whilk I wud rather not explicit.”

“Then, Taffy, your thoughts are running in about the same
direction as mine; but let us all keep our own counsel.”

“That I wull do; but if he comes speering and ordering great
deal mucher about the wark and bizness things, with the leave
of my young leddy, I'll not budge a fot for him.”

“Nor need you; for if you are content to go on, and be as
trusty and capable, in the labors and management of the
place, as you and Maggy have always shown yourselves, I
shall be happy to be the mistress here, without much help,
either from Deacon Mudgridge or his hopeful nephew.”

[figure description] Page 118.[end figure description]

“Ah, now! that is the old kurnel hisself, speeching through
his own, whole-blud dochter!” exclaimed Taffy, who had long
secretly disliked and distrusted Deacon Mudgridge, and was
consequently highly gratified with this discovery of his young
mistress's views and feelings. “Maggy! my dule and doubt are
over! It is all right with her, she shall be top of the hape,
in spite of long-faces or short-faces, deil or dummy. Yes, my
braw young leddy, you shall be whole mistress here till you
take one of your own chusing to hold the reins with you.”

“And whan she do chuse,” added Maggy, with a roguish
glance to Madian, “I hope he will be a nary worse one than
the goodly young man that helped her and her mother through
the snow-storm, on their visit to Boston two year agone.”

“Tush! tush! Maggy,” said Taffy, jocosely, “you mak my
young leddy look rud in the cheek. But she needn't shame
about it; for Vane Willis is a young man the kurnel hisself
wud be proud of.”

“I thank you both,” said the blushing, but gratified girl.
“And now, as I think we all understand each other, I will
bid you good night, and retire. But one word more,” added
she, lingering and hesitating in the door-way,—“I have
some reason to suspect that there is a plot afoot to work mischief
for Mr. Willis,—by whom, you can guess, perhaps.
Now if you go out into the street to-night, Taffy, you might
gather something about it, perhaps. You remember the attempt
they once made to banish my father on charge of
Quakerism?”

“Certes, I do; but they daur not come to drive him away;
an they had, I wud hav gin my old flint-lock a warming with
gunpowder. An they wull as little daur touch Mr. Willis,
I opine. But we'll find out what they're at,” he added, taking
his hat, and on the hint thus received, immediately
leaving the house on his way to the village.

“Let others do the talking, and you the listening, Taffy, if

[figure description] Page 119.[end figure description]

you wud succeed in speiring out anything,” said the shrewd
Maggy, calling after him.

Having thus seen love's garrison at the Southworth domicil
put in as good a state of defence as the circumstances
would permit, we will now follow Taffy in his news-gathering
rounds through the village, to see, with him, what might there
be going forward.

Sauntering along the street, with an air of indifference, but
with all his senses intent on whatever came within their
reach, the cautious Welchman at length reached the central
square, where the street scene described in the opening of
the last chapter occurred, and where a crowd was again assembled,
discussing the events of the preceding evenings, and
recounting the omens and prodigies which had then come to
light, together with others that had been since heard of as
constantly occurring in almost every part of the country.

When Taffy joined the group, Dick Swain was proceeding
in full blast with a description of his adventure with a prowling
band of King Philip's Indians, and his marvelous escape,
which he attributed solely, as Willis had predicted he would,
to his own prowess.

“But the instigator of that foul deed, which came so near
costing me my life,” he added, in conclusion,—“the instigator
is well known; and he is a marked man, too, as you might
judge for yourselves, maybe, if you could see all the papers
now in the constable's pocket.”

Others then held forth on the alarming portents of the
times—of the sights seen in the heavens, and

But as many and alarming as had been these prodigies, the

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list was not yet completed. While the excited crowd were
still engaged in discussing those that had occurred, their attention
was arrested by a solitary voice, which was heard rising
from some elevated point in the distance. All wildly started,
and then fixed themselves in an attitude of intense listening.
For a moment all was silent; then the voice came swelling on
the gentle night breeze louder than before.

Who, or what could it be? It could not be a man, they
thought, for it seemed to come from some point far above the
level of the earth; and besides that, there was a strange and
awful solemnity in the tones, that recalled the conceptions
they had formed of the voice of a warning angel. But
“Hark! hark!” they cried, in eager, half-whispered exclamations.
“How clear and distinctly it comes now! It utters
words! there! listen! listen!”

“Woe to this wicked land! woe! woe to the inhabitants
thereof! They have polluted the altars of the Lord, and made
many to stumble at his law by their works of injustice and
oppression. Woe! woe to them all, for fiery judgments are
at hand, and they shall be humbled, for that they have gone
astray and done wickedly—for that they have—!”

Here the words became too inaudible in the dying of the
breeze that had wafted the sounds to the ears of the dismayed
listeners, to enable them to make out any connected sentence.
But the voice for some time continued to reach their ears, and
enough was distinguished to tell them that the burden of the
strange message was one of solemn warning, and predicted
woe.

It were, perhaps, a hopeless task to undertake to make
readers, in this present age of almost entire disbelief in aught
not explainable on natural principles, realize how great was
the effect produced on the public mind at that time, by incidents
of the character we have introduced here and in some
of the preceding pages. But it must be recollected that it

[figure description] Page 121.[end figure description]

was then on the eve of the great moral epidemic which, a few
years later, seized on the public mind, and became fully
developed in that strange and fearful delusion now familiarly
known under the appellation of the Salem Witchcraft, and
that all the elements that produced it were already generated,
and would have now, probably, burst into action, but for the
powerful diversion of the current in which the thoughts of
men were running, caused by the terrible realities of the
desolating war that intervened. The class of theologians—
demon-ologians they might more properly be called—who then
controlled public opinion, becoming bewildered in the fogs of
mystic philosophy, and launching out on its sea of uncertainties
till they were hopelessly beyond the moorings of reason,
had been, for many years previous, palming on the too willing
ear of the multitude, their distempered imaginings, for the
doctrines of truth and revelation; and the crop that ere long
sprang up was but the natural result of broad-cast dissemination.
The public mind became—only more intensely like that
which had formed it—dark, mysticised, bewildered. Men saw
and heard strange and ominous sights and sounds in all the
heavens above, and on the earth beneath. To their distorted
conceptions, all space had become peopled with dark, indefinite,
mysterious, and questionable incorporeal agencies. Spirits,
sprites, goblins, gnomes, demons, and devils, of every class,
size, shape, and degree, were all around, above, below, upon,
and within them; and the consequence was, that a whole
people came near perishing—not from the lack, but the repletion
of vision.

But to return to the incident above narrated. Not one in
ten of those whose senses had thus attested it, probably, had
the least doubt that the voice and words that had so mysteriously
fallen on their ears had proceeded from other than the
human organs of speech. This conviction alone was enough
to fill them with fear and perplexity, while the words, so

[figure description] Page 122.[end figure description]

significant of coming evil, completed their amazement and alarm.
The affair, therefore, as well might be expected, spread like
wild fire through the town and surrounding country, and
became almost the sole topic of conversation, both in private
circles and public gatherings, through the next day. There
were a few, it was true, who ventured to suggest that there
might be some misapprehension or mistake about the alleged
fact that a voice, uttering intelligible words, had been heard.
But the doubts of this class were all silenced when the now
almost dreaded darkness had again shrouded the earth; for
then the same clear, trumpet-like voice was again heard rising
on the night air, and pouring forth, in solemn and pitying
accents, its burden of prophetic woe. And on the next, and
on many of the succeeding nights, the same awe-inspiring
mystery was repeated; and then it was heard no more. But
it had been heard enough to complete the work of agitation
and alarm among all classes, which the preceding prodigies
and other ill-omened incidents had put in such rapid progress.
The court of Plymouth were called together, to take the
alarming aspect of public affairs under consideration. The
leaders of the church also held a special conclave, in which,
although Deacon Mudgridge expressed the opinion that the
voice, which had been the greatest cause of the general alarm,
“was only that of the Man of Sin, or Great Deceiver, come
to distract the people and frighten them from their duty,” it
was yet at length decided to appoint a day of public fasting
and prayer. And the Deacon and his Shadow thereupon
immediately set to work in drawing up an enumeration of
subjects to be made the special themes of humiliation and
prayerful confession to the offended Heaven; among the
principal of which was “the wicked laxity latterly shown by
the church and state in not bringing, as formerly, all Quakers
and heretics to the condign punishment they deserved, and

[figure description] Page 123.[end figure description]

thereby incurring that displeasure of Heaven which was now
threatening to visit the land in judgment.”

As soon as this was arranged by the church leaders, they
joined the civil functionaries; and their united deliberations
soon resulted in the determination, not only to appoint a
public fast, and carry out the suggestions of Mudgridge in regard
to Quakers and other heretical persons, but to raise a
company of soldiers, and also to despatch at once fast-riding
couriers to the sister colony of Massachusetts, to invite their
co-operation and assistance, by sending on one or more armed
companies, to aid in the war which had now been shown to be
inevitable and imminent.

But as deeply and exclusively as the subject of the impending
calamities of war were occupying the minds of all others,
there was one man with whom these matters appeared to be a
secondary interest. During all the commotion, the untiring
Deacon Mudgridge had never, for one hour, lost sight of his
determinate project of uniting his nephew and Madian Southworth
in marriage. Aud instead of being willing to await the
softening influences which time and gentle means might work
on her feelings, he seemed strangely intent on pressing the
matter to an immediate issue. After brooding a day or two
over his chafed and chagrined feeling, occasioned by the resolute
resistance with which the spirited girl had met his infamous
requirements at the interview we have described, he
at length worked himself up to the determination of staking
all on a bold and desperate measure to forestall her opposition,
believing the strength of his position and his influence to be
sufficient to enable him to carry it out with safety and success.
This new and bold plan was, without consulting or apprising
Madian, or apprising her or any one else of his intention, to
cause the bans of the projected match to be proclaimed in
church the next Sunday. And it was done—to the utter astonishment
and blank dismay of the unapprised maiden, it

[figure description] Page 124.[end figure description]

was shamelessly done in her own presence in church, at the
close of the services, while the people were already in motion
to depart. Under the first impulse, she tried to speak out to
forbid the bans. But so great was the tumult of her feelings
that her tongue utterly refused to do its office. And deeply
muffling her face in her veil to hide her emotions, she hurried
home with a heart bursting with indignation and outraged
pride and delicacy.

But we do not propose to follow the doughty Deacon through
all the measures he now actively put in motion, under the
supposed advantage of his last resort for sacrificing the girl to
subserve his own selfish purposes. Suffice to say, that although,
through his various emissaries and tools, he worked
untiringly and desperately for the speedy accomplishment of
his base purpose—although, through the mistaken construction
of the obstinate silence, into which the menaces of himself
and the persecuting importunities of his minions had at
length driven the poor girl, he had taken so much courage as
to fix on the day for the wedding, and supposed the victory
was now as good as won—he was yet destined to disappointment.
He was doomed to undergo the mortification of witnessing
the failure of his plans in a manner he had little
anticipated, and to guard which he had made no calculations.
One morning Madian Southworth was unaccountably missing
from her home; and no one could tell where she had gone,
or what fate had befallen her, even Taffy and Maggy professing
to be as ignorant and anxious on the subject as the rest.
And notwithstanding all the efforts of the enraged Deacon and
his active satellites, not the least trace of her could be discovered,
nor any satisfactory explanation found for her mysterious
disappearance.

p719-130 CHAPTER VII.

“Give me the man of upright heart
Who dares the truth to utter,
And act the noble, manly part
Though enemies may mutter!”

[figure description] Page 125.[end figure description]

The next successive step in the progress of our eventful
story, will take us to the quiet banks of that beautiful but
singularly sinuous river of eastern Massachusetts, which, after
meandering its way full one hundred miles to gain one fourth
of that number in direct distance, and thereby embracing
within its doubling folds more than twenty of the best and
most populous towns in the state, comes gently urging its
tranquil waters to its briny estuary, where now lie, in the
parent city and its clustering appendants, those thronged
marts of trade and wealth, going to make up the proud emporium
of New England.

In an extensive grove of scattered pines, on the banks of
the stream just described, near the point where the brackish
and turbulent waters of the estuary subside into those of the
pure and gentle river, might have been seen, on a pleasant
evening, a few days subsequent to the events narrated in the
last chapter, a mingled multitude of men and boys from the
neighboring city, occasionally interspersed by a few shy, abject
looking natives of the forest—some listlessly sauntering
along the banks of the stream upward, some gathered round
a number of light shallops and skiffs moored to the shore at
the lower part of the grove, and others standing in scattered
groups further in shore, and, while engaged in conversation,

[figure description] Page 126.[end figure description]

frequently turning an eye or ear towards the southwest, as if
awaiting the sight or sound of something expected to approach
along the road from that direction. In one of these groups
stood our young hero, Vane Willis, who, it will be recollected,
had avowed his purpose of coming to this quarter to enlist
some chosen friends to stand ready to engage with him in repelling
the first onset in the war he so confidently anticipated.
He was conversing with a stoutly built, middle-aged man,
with a bronzed, weather-beaten visage, and a frank, resolute
countenance. Although the two had met for the first time
but an hour before, yet they had heard of each other, and
were now conversing with a freedom and confidence, which a
mutual appreciation of character will often at once beget between
the greatest of strangers.

“I have now,” said Willis, at the point of the conversation
which it concerns us to report—“I have now privately
enrolled in your colony, Captain Mosely, a dozen choice fellows
that I have been with enough in forest hardships and
dangers, to know the mettle they are made of; and, within
another week, I will have twice that number in my own colony,
equally well fitted for the service. And having appointed
a midway rendezvous, we will all be ready to take the
field, or the forest, as the case may require, within twenty-four
hours after the first act of hostility shall have occurred.”

“The first act of hostility!” exclaimed the other, repeating
the words in surprise—“Why, that has already occurred.”

“When and where do you make that out?” asked the
former.

“Last week, in Plymouth, as I supposed you knew,” replied
Mosely. “The cussed hell-hounds, they say, came
boldly into that town and carried off one of the citizens; and
though he escaped with his life, I believe, he found the woods
full of the red devils preparing to fall on the settlements. It

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was that news which the messengers brought, with what was
known before, that led our court to authorize me to raise the
company of volunteers I have been telling you about.”

“That! Oh, that was no very serious matter, I fancy,”
said Willis, smiling. “But after all, it is well, perhaps, that
it happened; for it may arouse the Plymouth leaders to a sense
of the dangers they have incurred by their own short-sighted
policy, and teach them the necessity of preparing for a blow
which is now sure to fall upon us soon; and if it is delayed,
it will only be to make the stroke more certain and heavy.”

“Well, people are so excited and crazy these days that one
scarce knows what to believe. I didn't think it a very likely
story, myself: nor have I believed any thing in their cussed
mummery about the signs and omens. But I fully agree with
you, that your stupid Plymouth managers have brought trouble
on us all. And it will probably be found that you and I
have moved none too early in the business. You and your
company of woodsmen, I plainly perceive, will be just the fellows
to cope with this kind of foe, in all the bush-fighting, at
least. You have a commission, I suppose?

“No; I and my boys are agoing to fight on our own hook.
I have not asked for a commission, and having openly condemned
the course of the Plymouth Court, I should not get
one if I had.”

“I shouldn't think you need have much trouble about
that, my young friend; you belong to the church, of course?”

“No, captain, I have not that honor.”

“Oh, that's it,—I see now,—there's the secret of your difficulty,
Willis. I could not have got up a single peg in this
colony, an' I had not thrown my anchor on a church bottom.”

“You a church member?—You who was brought up a swearing
soldier in the English army that took Jamaica from the
Spanish; and then, if they didn't belie you, Captain, sailed
some time with the West India buccaneers, and always was in

[figure description] Page 128.[end figure description]

the habit of cursing and swearing enough to throw old Shimei
himself into the shade.—You in the church?”

“You talk rather plainly about past matters, it strikes me,
young man. And if you was one of your mealy-mouthed hypocrites,
you and I would see who was the best man. But as
you are one of the sincere, out-spoken sort of fellows I like, I
wlll take no offense and answer your question. I am a member,
and, for anything I know, in regular standing in the
church.”

“But how could you get in, Captain?”

“I will tell you, as it may be some use to you, hereafter,
perhaps, though the less you mouth it the better. Well,
when I gave up roving, about ten years ago, and settled down
here to be something, I soon saw I should be little better than
nobody at all, unless I got into the church; and so I offered
myself. But, for some time, owing, I was told, to that cuss'd
habit of swearing you speak of, I found the gate shut against
me. Well, as I did not like to give in beat, and as I could
not break up the habit, I cast round for some safe outlet for it,
which I at length found. For having noticed that these particular
church gentry had a sort of orthodox fashion of swearing
themselves, about the men and things they hated, I improved
on the hint thus obtained, and at once turned all my
heaviest batteries upon the Quakers and heretics, whom I
then fell to cussing and damning like the house a-fire. And
the result of it all was, that I soon sailed into the churchharbor
with flying colors.”

“I can't say, Captain,” remarked Willis, good-humoredly
shaking his head,—“that I quite approve the principle you
apear to have acted on in the matter.”

“Nor I,” bluntly responded Mosely, — “I know well
enough that it was a cussed mean principle; but it was as good
an one as the strait-laced times would admit. If it was a
wrong one, the responsibility, I hold, should be on those, who,

[figure description] Page 129.[end figure description]

by making church-membership the only stepping-stone to office,
tempted me to resort to it. They could not expect a
fellow of any gumption was a-going to sit down contented to
remain at the bottom of the heap forever.”

“But you must surely feel a reverence for religion?”

“Religion? To be sure I do. It is my best private comforter.
But what has that to do with the church? I hold
religion to be quite too good a thing to be mixed up with
church matters; and they shall never have mine, I swear to
them, to use for that purpose.”

“Some such notions, I confess, have often been forced on
my mind; for, as deeply as I love and reverence the gospel
of our Saviour, I cannot agree with the practical construction
so often put upon it by our church and state rulers, in their
persecutions of dissenting sects, and in their violation of the
rights of the Indians, even where the poor, trusting creatures
have become their own converts, as in the cruel and unnecessary
measure which we are now waiting to see executed, and
which will probably make scores of them enemies, who, if let
alone, might be made useful friends in the approaching
war.”

“Yes, a cussed foolish buzziness, as I have told them,” responded
the blunt captain. “But, hark! was not that the
blast of a trumpet? Ay, ay, there they come! Captain
Prentiss and his red brood just heaving in sight, yonder,”
added the speaker, pointing up the road, round a distant curve
of which a well mounted military officer, with a trumpeter at
his side, followed by a strong company of cavalry, enclosing a
motley body of two or three hundred Indians of all ages and
sexes, hurrying along on foot, came sweeping into view.

The occasion of this unwonted spectacle, as may have been
already partly inferred from the closing words of the foregoing
dialogue, as well as of the assembling of those here present,
to witness it, was the removal, under an order of the Gen

[figure description] Page 130.[end figure description]

eral Court, of the large body of christianized Indians who had
long since been peacably located at Natic, and who were now
being conducted by a military force to this place for embarkation,
in boats, for their destination on Deer Island, lying
outside of Boston harbor, at too great a distance from the
main land, it was supposed, to permit of their escape.

Nearly a quarter of a century before the period of which we
are writing, the self-sacrificing John Eliot, the St. John of
the new world, who, instead of aspiring to the positions of
honor and influence among his own people, to which his acknowledged
talents and learning would have doubtless elevated
him, devoted all the energies of his life to the work of christianizing
the natives of the forest, had seen the great wish of
his heart realized in the permanent settlement of a large body
of his red disciples at Natic.*

After the most unwearied efforts, he had succeeded in obtaining
the cession of the five or six thousand acres of land,
which was to constitute this Indian town, from the inhabitants
of Dedham, who appear to have claimed the tract as part of
their own territory. Next, he procured a quit claim conveyance
of the tract, from one Speene and his associates, who, on
their part, claimed the original right of soil; and, finally, to
make the grant doubly secure against future contesting claimants,
he had obtained for it the formal confirmation of the
General Court of the Colony.

Here the indefatigable apostle to the wild children of the
forest, as he has been so justly called, had gathered in his
disciples from all quarters, joined them, with the labors of his
own hands, in building a bridge across Charles river, which
ran through the town; in erecting a spacious meeting-house as
the general centre of their Christian worship; and lastly, in

[figure description] Page 131.[end figure description]

building permanent dwelling-houses for a village, and for an
agricultural independent community, which no earthly powers
had the right to molest, so long as engaged in the peaceful
pursuit of their avocations.

Here the gratified leader had spent months and months,
through a period of more than twenty years, in privately instructing
his trusting and devoted followers in the arts of
civilized life, in civil polity for the government of their community,
and especially, in the simple but sublime truths of
Christian revelation. Here, he statedly preached to them in
the loved tabernacle which he had helped them to build and
consecrate, and to which, on each hallowed Sabbath morning,
they came flocking at the beat of a drum, like loving doves
to their windows. In short, he had labored and lived to see
his hopeful flock here permanently settled—gaining year by
year in temporal thrift and moral elevation, and in making
such a progress in Christian knowledge and virtue, as to have
gained for them as a church, the full acknowledgment and
fellowship of all the white Christian churches in the colony.
And he had not only beheld, as he did with unspeakable satisfaction,
the practicability of his great experiment for christianizing
the red men, thus measurably demonstrated to the
doubting world, and his labors of love crowned year after year
with a more and more perfect success; but he had lived to
enjoy the additional gratification of beholding the natural
antipathies of the people at large against the objects of his
affectionate solicitude, to all appearance, nearly overcome, or
so far, at least, that they began to be looked upon as fellowmen,
and entitled to the ordinary privileges of humanity.

But latterly, a change had come over the spirit of the people.
The jealousy and hatred which had been long springing
up between the colony at Plymouth, and King Philip and his
subjects, and which had now come to a crisis, had, within the
last year or two been rapidly spreading among the colonists

[figure description] Page 132.[end figure description]

of Massachusetts, who hitherto had treated the natives with
much more fairness than had been shown them by the
people of Plymouth, and had so little sympathized in the
fears and suspicions of the latter as to have often interposed
to rebuke and quiet their growing disaffection.

At the present juncture, however, the old antipathies of the
Bay colonists seemed not only to have been fully revived, but
now to have been fanned to a flame by the startling news from
Plymouth. They everywhere began to look upon the natives
with distrust, and whatever their tribal relations, or whatever
their character for friendliness or Christian conduct, to place
them all in one and the same category—that of the natural
enemies of the white men. And the General Court, sharing
in the prevalent excitement and alarm, had not only taken
steps to raise military forces, but passed a decree for the forcible
removal, or rather virtual imprisonment of the praying
Indians. Accordingly, the thorough going Captain Prentiss
had been promptly dispatched with his company of cavalry to
their principal establishment at Natic, to drive them from
their doubly guaranteed homes and possessions, and conduct
them off, like a gang of slaves, to a barren island which could
afford them at best, but a pitiable subsistence.

In a short time the showy and domineering cavalcade with
their long line of sorrowing victims, came pouring along
against the landing, where the boats were in waiting to receive
them; when the sharp, stern voice of Captain Prentiss was
heard commanding a halt, and issuing his orders for an immediate
embarkation.

At this moment a plainly dressed man of a clerical air, and
a meek, pleading countenance, was seen hastening, with the
quick, tremulous steps of age, from a neighboring coppice,
and eagerly making his way through the crowd towards the
spot where the officer just named sat on his horse, giving directions
to his subordinates respecting the business on hand.

[figure description] Page 133.[end figure description]

It was the good Eliot, the Indian Apostle, whose body, worn
and exhausted in the willing service of benefiting the red man,
was now tottering on the brink of the grave, but whose soul
was still glowing with the intensity of his love and yearning
solicitude for the unfortunate race, for whose eternal welfare
he had spent, without hope of any earthly reward, all the best
part of his laborious life. He had heard of the project of
their cruel and unwarranted banishment with deep surprise,
and with feelings of unspeakable anguish. He had remonstrated
with the leading men of the court, and persevered in
his intercessions until he had brought upon himself the contumely
of both the rulers and the people, who had now become
so crazed with fear and excitement, as not only to look upon
all the praying Indians as secret plotters in aid of the impending
war, but to regard, with dislike and suspicion, every
white man who ventured to speak a word in their defence.
But he might as well have remonstrated with the angry billows
of the ocean for dashing over their usual limits when
lashed into blind fury by the power of the natural tempest.
And having found all his remonstrances and intercessions
wholly ineffectual, and having that morning seen, with an
aching heart, the troops depart to carry the despotic order
into execution, he had come here to take a sad farewell of his
beloved flock, minister to them the consolations of the gospel,
and offer up for their future welfare and safety his prayers
and intercessions to Him, with whom, he felt he might plead
unrebuked for that answer of peace which he had failed to
receive from men who professed to worship the same God
with himself, and who, at that very hour, perhaps were thanking
him for the success of their unholy doings in the present
outrage.

As the venerable man passed along through the yielding
throng, who seemed to shrink from his presence as from the
contact of a leper, many a spiteful hiss reached his ears, and

[figure description] Page 134.[end figure description]

many a pointed finger of scorn greeted his eyes; but, heeding
none of them, he pressed on to the side of the stern commander
and meekly asked his attention in listening to “a respectful
request for a small favor, the granting of which would be
received with much gratitude.”

“Favor! what favor, old man?” gruffly responded the
officer, looking down with an air of mingled impatience and
disdain upon the meek suppliant.

“These once wild but now well meaning people, Captain
Prentiss,” respectfully but earnestly urged the aged intercessor,
“have for more than a score of my weary years, been
the especial subjects of my ministerial labors. I love them
as children; and they have come to look on me as their father
and friend; and the favor I have to ask, is to be permitted,
for one short hour, to hold a little meeting with them,
in some secluded corner of this shady grove, where unmolested,
I may commune with them, pray with them, and give
them my parting counsels. I cannot think the General Court
would refuse.”

“Yes, yes, I hear you, sir,” impatiently interrupted the
other. “But instead of receiving such an undeserved permission,
to enable you, for ought I know, to preach to them
a little more of the sedition you are suspected of by some,
shouldn't you be well satisfied with the favor the Court has
already mercifully vouchsafed you, in that you are not driven
off with them?”

Repeated bursts of laughter ran through the crowd, in savage
approval of the words of the last speaker, who, after glancing
around with a gratified air a moment, was about to resume;
when Captain Mosely, who had stood by witnessing what took
place, promptly stepped forward, and in his abrupt, bold manner,
exclaimed,

“Avast! there, Captain Prentiss. This, to be sure, is none
of my commands, or my business—thank God for it!—and I

[figure description] Page 135.[end figure description]

don't wish to interfere; but, natheless, I may suggest whether
we had better do any thing that will make the Indians themselves
blush for us. We must recollect that these poor
creatures have not, as yet, done any thing blameworthy; and
as they are about to be shipped, both they and their preacher
very naturally want a little talk and worship together, and I
move they have the permit. I will be answerable for all the
sedition Father Eliot will preach to them; for, to say nothing
about you, captain, I wish to God I was half as good a man
as I believe him to be.”

A visible frown passed over the sternly grave countenance
of the military bigot who had been selected for the present
service, but he was evidently staggered by the plain remarks
of Mosely, who, whatever his faults, was a great favorite
among the common people, and who, as the former perceived
from sundry manifestations of applause with which his remarks
were also in turn received, was not without a strong party in
the crowd to sustain him; and the result was, that Captain
Prentiss, after a brief consultation with his lieutenant, commanded
the attention of his company, and announced to them
that, “as Captain Mosely had agreed to become responsible
for the Indians in charge, while they and their minister should
hold a short prayer-meeting, the troop might now take a respite
of one half hour, at the end of which they must all be in
readiness—one half to take the horses round to Boston, and
the other half to go with him in the boats to take the suspected
heathen crew to their destination.”

“Captain Mosely,” said Willis, who had retained his place
at the side of the other, and had been the most out-spoken of
all in approval of his course, “I shall always honor you for
your fearless and humane interposition. They not only meant
to insult Father Eliot, but deprive him of all chance to speak
to his flock. But here he comes to thank you himself, I
presume.”

[figure description] Page 136.[end figure description]

“It is truly so,” said the good old man, feelingly, as he
warmly grasped the rough palm of the captain, while a tear
was starting to his eye, and his lips began to tremble with his
grateful emotions. “Sir, I th—ank you,—thank you for this!
May God bless you. Yea, and you, too, young man, for approving
the kind act. You both shall have my prayers.”

“Well, we need 'em bad enough—at least I do,” responded
Mosely; “but no thanks, Father Eliot; I don't deserve 'em,
for I spoke out for myself, being riled all up to see them use
you so, like cussed Arabs.”

“Oh, don't curse them,” said the other, “don't curse them.
They knew not what they did. Let it all pass. But they
have allowed me brief time — I must improve it,” he added,
turning away and hastening to a little elevation, where he
could be seen and heard by all of his dusky flock.

“My children!” he then cried, in the most touching
accents of affection, “we have found friends, and they have
prevailed. We are to be indulged in a short meeting. So
follow me, now—follow me, my children.”

The gratified apostle then with hurrying steps led the way
to a place in another part of the grove, which he seemed to
have already selected for the purpose; while the agitated mass
of his devoted followers, with eyes gleaming with joy and love,
and with the confiding alacrity of a brood of chickens running
at the call of the feathered parent, went streaming along after
him. When he reached the allotted place, which was an open
grassy plat, surrounded with low evergreens, he took his stand
in the centre, and, with a countenance working with emotion,
he motioned them to arrange themselves around him. He
then commenced the loving ceremony of taking them, one
after another, individually by the hand, exchanging with them,
in broken utterance, the mutual salutations, and ministering
to them all the words of faith and Christian consolation.

“Hard, hard, farder Eliot,” said these sobbing children of

[figure description] Page 137.[end figure description]

persecution, as they came up to grasp the proffered hand of
their idolized pastor, and to water it with their tears—“hard
go away so! never, may be, come back again! then no more
Natic home, no more green fields, no more good houses, no
more meeting house, no more pray there, no more preach, no
more see good farder Eliot—Oh, hard, hard!”

“Yes, yes, my beloved children,” would reply the weeping
pastor, to remarks like these, “it is indeed a sore trial, and
hard to be borne; but we must all bow to the will of the
Great and good One above, who has doubtless ordered it for
wise purposes, and our own benefit. It has often been so
with the followers of the Lamb, who has told us, that through
much tribulation we must enter the kingdom of God.”

At the conclusion of this touching scene, in which more
than half the allotted time had been spent in thus commingling
their sorrows and sympathies, he asked them all to
kneel on the ground closely around him. Readily comprehending
the object, they immediately gathered up, dropped
upon their knees in thickly encircling lines, and reverently
bowed their grief-bedewed faces to the earth; when, with his
thin, trembling hands widely spread over them, the silvery
locks of his uncovered head, rising and falling in the fitful
evening breeze, and the fast coming tears coursing down his
furrowed cheeks, the good and guileless old man lifted up his
broken voice and prayed—

“O thou good and merciful God, who hast proclaimed thyself
the father of all, are not these poor, suffering, and sorrowing
ones, all thy children? Are they not as dear to thee,
and as much entitled to thy kindly regard, as those, whom,
in thy ever wise dispensations, thou hast permitted thus to
afflict them? We entreat thee, then, O heavenly Parent, as
much of the red man as the white—our Father, and their Father—
our God, and their God—we entreat thee, in the faith
and love thou hast planted with thine own hand in the

[figure description] Page 138.[end figure description]

yearning bosom of thy unworthy servant—we earnestly entreat
thee to take them under thy especial care and protection, doing
unto them, and for them, according to their need and
their weakness, to enable them to bear up under the heavy
hand of the strong that has now been so grievously laid upon
them. Give them of the fullness of thy grace and love.
Make good unto them all the peace and satisfaction of which
their misguided oppressors may now perchance be deprived,
for their offences towards these little ones, of the same Christian
family. Take them by thy fostering and fatherly hand,
and lead them in pleasant places. Provide for all their temporal
wants. Vouchsafe to them thy choicest blessings.
Minister unto them, and comfort them in all their trials and
afflictions. Guard them from all the forms of sin and temptation.
Constantly reveal thyself to them in thine unerring
Spirit, as a light to guide their feet in their strivings onward
along their dim pathway, to a more perfect righteousness
above. Guide them safely through this thorny vale of life;
and finally, O merciful Redeemer, gather them all to the great
fold of thy loved and accepted ones in heaven.”

The last word of this impassioned appeal to heaven in behalf
of this injured flock of converted and affiliated Indians,
had scarcely died away among the whispering pines, before
the stern, harsh voice of Captain Prentiss, now seen galloping,
with fiercely waving sword, towards the spot, was heard
authoritatively exclaiming—

“Turn out! turn out there! ye moping mischief brewers.
Your time is up. Budge along here, then, to the boats; and
step lively, every soul of ye, or I'll have a platoon of troopers
at your heels!”

With the hurried, apprehensive motions of a gang of slaves,
sharply threatened with the lash of the master, the Indians
bade their now doubly dear, earthly shepherd a hasty farewell;
for they saw he was too much overpowered by his

[figure description] Page 139.[end figure description]

emotions to follow them on their thronged way to the landing,
where they had hoped he would repair to give them his final
blessing. But though deprived of this satisfaction, they were
not to be left without a compensating comfort. Through the
openings of the swaying shubbery, they occasionally caught
precious glimpses of his revered person, still standing on the
consecrated spot, where solitary and silent, he was now affectionately
stretching out his arms towards them, and now raising
them aloft, as if to snatch from Heaven one more blessing
on their departing heads.

If there is any form of worship among men acceptable in
the sight of heaven, it must be the secretly offered incense of
a trusting and devoted heart; when words and thoughts are
breathed and shaped in the conscious absence of all human
witnesses. If men ever pray worthily, and in the unalloyed
sincerity of their hearts, it is then; for who shall say, how
many detracting thoughts,—how many shades of unworthy
feeling, or vanity, the lurking love of approbation, or the fear
of giving offence, may throw over the petitions of men praying
in public? Many a public prayer, we fear, has been
framed less for the acceptance of Heaven, than the admiration
of men.

After father Eliot had stood some time indulging in his
grief, and in the outpourings of his heart in secret prayer, he
turned, with heavy steps, to depart; when he, for the first
time, became aware that the scene just described had not been
without a concealed witness, whose searching scrutiny above
that of all other men, he would, under the peculiar circumstance,
have been the most anxious to avoid. But for a new
scene, let us take a new chapter.

p719-145 CHAPTER VIII.

“Kind nature's commoners, from her they drew
Their needful wants, and learn'd not how to hoard;
And him whom strength and wisdom crown'd they knew,
But with no servile reverence, as their lord.
And on their mountain summits they ador'd
One great good Spirit, in his high abode.
These simple truths went down from sire to son,
To reverence age,—the sluggish hunter's shame,
And craven warrior's infamy to shun,—
And still avenge each wrong to friend or kindred done.”
Eastburne.

[figure description] Page 140.[end figure description]

While father Eliot, as mentioned at the close of the last
chapter, was turning away from the place where he had been
mournfully lingering, with thoughts still dwelling on the departed
objects of his solicitude, his attention was suddenly
arrested by the sound of a footfall behind him, and almost at
the same instant, by a light tap on his shoulder. Wheeling
quickly around, in the surprise, he found himself confronting
a tall, commanding figure, garbed in an English dress throughout,
and so little darker in complexion than many of the
bronzed seamen every day to be encountered at the neighboring
port, that he might well have been taken for one by those
who had never before encountered him, and noted his peculiarly
piercing, yet mild and pleasant countenance. But Eliot
had done both; and, after gazing a moment, doubtfully, upon
the intruder, who had receded a step, and stood with folded
arms, smilingly waiting to see if he could be recognized, the
former said—

[figure description] Page 141.[end figure description]

“King Philip! Is not this King Philip of Mount
Hope?”

“Yes, Mr. Eliot.”

“But, King Philip, what has brought you here so unexpectedly?”

“I came into this colony to see for myself what was doing
here about things needful for me to know, Mr. Eliot. I
came to this spot for the same purpose, it may be, as you
did.”

“And have you witnessed the little meeting I have just
had with my Christian flock, at this place?”

“I have—I stood in the bush near by, saw all—heard
all.”

“I feared so—I am sorry, King Philip.”

“Why should Mr. Eliot be sorry? His words were good—
they were very kind to the red men.”

“I am sorry, because I fear you will argue wrongfully
about our religion, on account of the treatment you may have
seen some Christian white men bestowing on the undeserving
red men, to-day.”

“Why argue wrong, if I did argue, as you may well say
you fear I would? Your Bible say—you preach yourself—the
tree is known by the fruit it grow. I told you, Mr. Eliot,
when, many moons ago, you come to Montaup to see you
could make me praying Indian. I told you then your religion
not worth one of the buttons on your coat. I had often
seen what it made white men in Plymouth. I now have seen
what it make them here.”

“Oh, you must not judge our religion by the mistaken
conduct of its professors in some cases,” responded the other,
in evident distress, and in no small strait to know how to repel
the inference, which his conscience told him the conduct
of his people had given his shrewd opponent too much reason
for drawing. “Professors often go astray, and do very wrong.

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But if they are so prone to do wrong with religion, what might
they not do without it?”

“You may best answer that question yourself, Mr. Eliot;
and I will put another to go along with it:—If Indians be
such devils, hell-hounds, damned bad men, as you whites call
them, without your religion, what would they be if they had
it? No, no, Mr. Eliot, though you be a good man, I don't
want your religion for my people—certain not while there are so
many white Christians in the land to bring it into disgrace in
the eyes of Indians. If we red men, as in times long gone,
were all the people this side of the great water, it might be
different. In such case, I sometime said, may be I would
like to try it for my people.”

“Oh! the misconduct of professing Christians that are thus
bringing our religion into reproach among those who would
otherwise receive it! King Philip, you judge erringly. The
treatment you may have received from a few has embittered
you against all. We have taken no part against you in your
difficulties with the Plymouth people; and yet, it is now said,
you are about to wage a bloody war with us all. The people
of this colony are greatly alarmed; and the court have appointed
a commissioner to set out immediately for Mount
Hope, to see you, remonstrate, and treat with you. That commissioner
applied to me, this very morning, to go with him;
and I was to give him my answer at this place, where I presume
he is still lingering about the landing to receive it.
Shall I tell him you will be there to receive us?”

“No; too late. Your colony are doing things that make
it not possible to treat with them. Tell him no use to go.
I shall not be at Montaup.”

“Then why not hear him here?”

“I said no use,—I say again. But I would hear his talk
if he came alone, or only with you, Mr. Eliot.”

“Then I will straightway go and see if I can find him.

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But see!” added the anxious intercessor, pointing to a well
dressed man imperfectly seen through the shubbery making
his way in that direction, and peering around him as if in
search of some one,—“See there comes the very man,—in
search of me probably. I will go forward and speak to him;
when we will both immediately come here for the interview.”

Eliot thereupon hurried away, met the commissioner in
question, when, after apprising him of the circumstances
just related, and holding a brief conversation, the two advanced
to the spot where the proud chieftain stood waiting to
afford the promised interview.

Eliot, in a kind and courtly manner, went through the ceremonies
of the introduction; when Metacom, with the dignity
and grace for which he was so remarkable on these occasions,
advanced, shook hands with the commissioner, and then, receding
a step, respectfully awaited the expected communication.

“King Philip,” said the commissioner, after a long, hesitating
pause, “news has reached us, that you are about to make
war against the colonies. Our governor and council, who
have appointed me to hold parley with you, cannot understand
how you can have any cause of war against the colony of Massachusetts,
who have always tried to stand peace-makers between
you and the Plymouth colony. And they instruct me to ask
you why you have thus declared war against us?”

“I have not declared war against your colony,” responded
the chief, with cool dignity. “My war is with the court
and people of Plymouth. But if the court of Massachusetts
make movement looking to join the Plymouth men, then they
make themselves all one of my enemies.”

“But we have made no such movements,” deprecatingly
said the commissioner.

“May-be,” replied Metacom with increasing coolness and
an air of irony. “May-be the court have sent a commissioner
to treat of peace without letting him know they are all the

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while preparing for war. If that be not so, what looks it to,
the forcibly driving away the peaceable red men of Natic from
the homes and lands they own as much as your rich men own
their houses in Boston? And what looks it to, the raising of
a war-armed company, under Captain Mosely, to march to
help the Plymouth colony? The commissioner does not
appear to be well instructed about what his colony is doing.”

“You wrongly interpret these movements,” replied the
nonplussed commissioner, who, as was evidently the case with
nearly all the public men of that period, had greatly underrated
the Indian character, and especially that of Philip, and
therefore was not prepared to find such a knowledge of the
secret movements of the court in his opponent—“You make
too much out of them, and I hope you will still consent to
treat for peace with our governor.”

“Your governor?” haughtily responded the proud monarch
of the Wampanoogs—“Your governor is a subject of King
Charles of England. I shall not treat with a subject. I shall
now only treat with the king, my brother. When he comes,
I am ready.”

This unexpected declaration of Metacom—who, believing
he had now fully fathomed the secret designs of Massachusetts
to take part with the colony of Plymouth in the war against
him, felt consequently not a little indignant that the former,
while privately instituting hostile movements, were hypocritically
pretending, in public, to desire to treat with him for
the continuance of a peace which he had never violated—
this declaration, as he intended it should, brought to an abrupt
termination the conference with the commissioner, who attempted
no reply. Father Eliot, however, began earnestly to
entreat Philip to pause before he should take any steps which
should involve alike, perhaps, all the white men and the red
men of New England, in a war of blood and desolation. But
the immoveable chief interrupted by saying—

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