to the charge from which he
had, nearly three years before, been torn. And Mr. Williams had the
courage to accept their offer, notwithstanding the fact that the war
continued with unabated bitterness. In 1707 the town voted to build him
a house "as big as Ensign Sheldon's, and a back room as big as may be
thought convenient." This house is still standing (1902), though Ensign
Sheldon's, the "Old Indian House in Deerfield," as it has been
popularly called, was destroyed more than half a century ago. The
Indian House stood at the northern end of Deerfield Common, and
exhibited to its latest day the marks of the tomahawk left upon its
front door in the attack of 1704, and the perforations made by the balls
inside. The door is still preserved, and is one of the most interesting
relics now to be seen in Memorial Hall, Deerfield.

For more than twenty years after his return from captivity, Mr. Williams
served his parish faithfully. He took into his new house a new wife, by
whom he had several children; and in this same house he passed
peacefully away June 12, 1729, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, and
the forty-fifth of his ministry.

Stephen Williams, who had been taken captive when a lad of eleven, was
redeemed in 1705 with his father. In spite of the hardships to which he
had been so early exposed, he was a fine strong boy when he returned to
Deerfield, and he went on with his rudely interrupted education to such
good effect that he graduated from Harvard in 1713 at the age of twenty.
In 1716 he settled as minister at Longmeadow, in which place he died in
1772. Yet his manhood was not passed without share in the wars of the
time, for he was chaplain in the Louisburg expedition in 1745, and in
the regiment of Colonel Ephraim Williams in his fatal campaign in 1755,
and again in the Canadian campaign of 1756. The portrait of him which is
here given was painted about 1748, and is now to be seen in the hall of
the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, within four-score rods of the
place where the boy captive was born, and from which he was carried as a
tender child into captivity.

[Illustration: REVEREND STEPHEN WILLIAMS.]

It has been said that one of the greatest trials of Mr. Williams's stay
in Canada was the discovery that his little daughter, Eunice, had been
taught by her Canadian captors to say prayers in Latin. But this was
only the beginning of the sorrow of the good man's life. Eunice was a
plastic little cr