dreadful calamities on the settlement. I was,
by chance, at a small village in the woods, more than thirty miles from
Boston, and in its situation exceedingly lonely, and surrounded with
thickets. Nevertheless, there was no idea of any danger from the Indians
at that time, for men trusted to the protection of a considerable body
of troops who had taken the field for protection of the frontiers, and
who lay, or were supposed to lie, betwixt the hamlet and the enemy's
country. But they had to do with a foe, whom the devil himself had
inspired at once with cunning and cruelty. It was on a Sabbath morning,
when we had assembled to take sweet counsel together in the Lord's
house. Our temple was but constructed of wooden logs; but when shall the
chant of trained hirelings, or the sounding of tin and brass tubes amid
the aisles of a minster, arise so sweetly to Heaven, as did the psalm in
which we united at once our voices and our hearts! An excellent worthy,
who now sleeps in the Lord, Nehemia Solsgrace, long the companion of
my pilgrimage, had just begun to wrestle in prayer, when a woman,
with disordered looks and dishevelled hair, entered our chapel in
a distracted manner, screaming incessantly, 'The Indians! The
Indians!'--In that land no man dares separate himself from his means of
defence; and whether in the city or in the field, in the ploughed land
or the forest, men keep beside them their weapons, as did the Jews at
the rebuilding of the Temple. So we sallied forth with our guns and
pikes, and heard the whoop of these incarnate devils, already in
possession of a part of the town, and exercising their cruelty on
the few whom weighty causes or indisposition had withheld from public
worship; and it was remarked as a judgment, that, upon that bloody
Sabbath, Adrian Hanson, a Dutchman, a man well enough disposed towards
man, but whose mind was altogether given to worldly gain, was shot and
scalped as he was summing his weekly gains in his warehouse. In fine,
there was much damage done; and although our arrival and entrance into
combat did in some sort put them back, yet being surprised and confused,
and having no appointed leader of our band, the devilish enemy shot
hard at us and had some advantage. It was pitiful to hear the screams of
women and children amid the report of guns and the whistling of bullets,
mixed with the ferocious yells of these savages, which they term their
war-whoop. Several houses in the upper part o