ever gave birth and nurture. As
soon as a canoe could float they were on the war path, and with the
cry of the returning wild fowl mingled the yell of these human tigers.
They burned, hacked and devoured, exterminating whole villages at
once.

A Mohawk war party once captured an Algonquin hunting party in which
were three squaws who had each a child of a few weeks or months old.
At the first halt the captors took the infants, tied them to wooden
spits, roasted them alive before a fire and feasted on them before
the eyes of the agonized mothers, whose shrieks, supplications and
frantic efforts to break the cords that bound them, were met with
mockery and laughter. "They are not men, they are wolves!" sobbed one
of the wretched women, as she told what had befallen her to the Jesuit
missionary.

Fearful as the Maliseets were of the Mohawks they were in turn
exceedingly cruel to their own captives and, strange as it may appear,
the women were even more cruel than the men. In the course of the
border wars English captives were exposed to the most revolting and
barbarous outrages, some were even burned alive by our St. John river
Indians.

But while cruel to their enemies, and even at times cruel to their
wives, the Indians were by no means without their redeeming features.
They were a modest and virtuous race, and it is quite remarkable that
with all their bloodthirstiness in the New England wars there is no
instance on record of the slightest rudeness to the person of any
female captive. This fact should be remembered to their credit by
those who most abhor their bloodthirstiness and cruelty. Nor were the
savages without a certain sense of justice. This we learn from the
following incident in the experience of the English captive John
Gyles.

"While at the Indian village (Medoctec) I had been cutting wood and
was binding it up with an Indian rope in order to carry it to the
wigwam when a stout ill-natured young fellow about 20 years of age
threw me backward, sat on my breast and pulling out his knife said
that he would kill me, for he had never yet killed an English person.
I told him that he might go to war and that would be more manly than
to kill a poor captive who was doing their drudgery for them.
Notwithstanding all I could say he began to cut and stab me on my
breast. I seized him by the hair and tumbled him from off me on his
back and followed him with my fist and knee so that he presently said
he had enough