ame down to the bank of the river and invited
the party to her house, telling the minister that she herself had once
been a prisoner among the Indians, and knew how to feel for him. She
seated him at a table, spread a table-cloth, and placed food before him,
while the Indians, to their great indignation, were supplied with a meal
in the chimney-corner. Similar kindness was shown by the inhabitants
along the way till the party reached their destination, the Abenaki
village of St. Francis, to which his masters belonged. Here there was a
fort, in which lived two Jesuits, directors of the mission, and here
Williams found several English children, captured the summer before
during the raid on the settlements of Maine, and already transformed
into little Indians both in dress and behavior. At the gate of the fort
one of the Jesuits met him, and asked him to go into the church and give
thanks to God for sparing his life, to which he replied that he would
give thanks in some other place. The priest then commanded him to go,
which he refused to do. When on the next day the bell rang for mass, one
of his Indian masters seized him and dragged him into the church, where
he got behind the door, and watched the service from his retreat with
extreme disapprobation. One of the Jesuits telling him that he would go
to hell for not accepting the apostolic traditions, and trusting only in
the Bible, he replied that he was glad to know that Christ was to be
his judge, and not they. His chief master, who was a zealot in his way,
and as much bound to the rites and forms of the Church as he had been
before his conversion to his "medicines," or practices of heathen
superstition, one day ordered him to make the sign of the cross, and on
his refusal, tried to force him. But as the minister was tough and
muscular, the Indian could not guide his hand. Then, pulling out a
crucifix that hung at his neck, he told Williams in broken English to
kiss it; and being again refused, he brandished his hatchet over him and
threatened to knock out his brains. This failing of the desired effect,
he threw down the hatchet and said he would first bite out the
minister's finger-nails,--a form of torture then in vogue among the
northern Indians, both converts and heathen. Williams offered him a hand
and invited him to begin; on which he gave the thumb-nail a gripe with
his teeth, and then let it go, saying, "No good minister, bad as the
devil." The failure seems to ha