the eighteenth century, where
Captain Moses Rice and Phineas Arms came suddenly one summer day to
the end of their planting and hoeing. The house at the foot of the hill
where the boy was cultivating his imagination had been built by Captain
Rice, and in the family burying-ground in the orchard above it lay the
body of this mighty militia-man, and beside him that of Phineas Arms,
and on the headstone of each the legend familiar at that period of our
national life, "Killed by the Indians." Happy Phineas Arms, at the age
of seventeen to exchange in a moment the tedium of the cornfield for
immortality.

There was a tradition that years after, when the Indians had disappeared
through a gradual process of intoxication and pauperism, a red man had
been seen skulking along the brow of this very hill and peering down
through the bushes where the boy was now perched on a tree, shaking his
fist at the hated civilization, and vengefully, some said pathetically,
looking down into this valley where his race had been so happy in the
natural pursuits of fishing, hunting, and war. On the opposite side of
the river was still to be traced an Indian trail, running to the western
mountains, which the boy intended some time to follow; for this highway
of warlike forays, of messengers of defiance, along which white maidens
had been led captive to Canada, appealed greatly to his imagination.

The boy lived in these traditions quite as much as in those of the
Revolutionary War into which they invariably glided in his perspective
of history, the redskins and the redcoats being both enemies of his
ancestors. There was the grave of the envied Phineas Arms--that ancient
boy not much older than he--and there were hanging in the kitchen the
musket and powder-horn that his great-grandfather had carried at Bunker
Hill, and did he not know by heart the story of his great-grandmother,
who used to tell his father that she heard when she was a slip of a
girl in Plymouth the cannonading on that awful day when Gage met his
victorious defeat?

In fact, according to his history-book there had been little but wars
in this peaceful nation: the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the incessant
frontier wars with the Indians, the Kansas War, the Mormon War, the War
for the Union. The echoes of the latter had not yet died away. What a
career he might have had if he had not been born so late in the world!
Swinging in this tree-top, with a vivid consciousness of life,