true, they
were not the men to court danger or rashly throw away their lives for the
mere glory of the sacrifice. They had always a prudent and wholesome
regard to their own comfort and safety; they justly looked upon sound
heads and limbs as better than broken ones; life was to them too serious
and important, and their hard-gained property too valuable, to be lightly
hazarded. They never attempted to cheat themselves by under-estimating
the difficulty to be encountered, or shutting their eyes to its probable
consequences. Cautious, wary, schooled in the subtle strategy of Indian
warfare, where self-preservation is by no means a secondary object, they
had little in common with the reckless enthusiasm of their French allies,
or the stolid indifference of the fighting machines of the British
regular army. When danger could no longer be avoided, they met it with
firmness and iron endurance, but with a very vivid appreciation of its
magnitude. Indeed, it must be admitted by all who are familiar with the
history of our fathers that the element of fear held an important place
among their characteristics. It exaggerated all the dangers of their
earthly pilgrimage, and peopled the future with shapes of evil. Their
fear of Satan invested him with some of the attributes of Omnipotence,
and almost reached the point of reverence. The slightest shock of an
earthquake filled all hearts with terror. Stout men trembled by their
hearths with dread of some paralytic old woman supposed to be a witch.
And when they believed themselves called upon to grapple with these
terrors and endure the afflictions of their allotment, they brought to
the trial a capability of suffering undiminished by the chloroform of
modern philosophy. They were heroic in endurance. Panics like the one
we have described might bow and sway them like reeds in the wind; but
they stood up like the oaks of their own forests beneath the thunder and
the hail of actual calamity.

It was certainly lucky for the good people of Essex County that no wicked
wag of a Tory undertook to immortalize in rhyme their ridiculous hegira,
as Judge Hopkinson did the famous Battle of the Kegs in Philadelphia.
Like the more recent Madawaska war in Maine, the great Chepatchet
demonstration in Rhode Island, and the "Sauk fuss" of Wisconsin, it
remains to this day "unsyllabled, unsung;" and the fast-fading memory of
age alone preserves the unwritten history of the great Ipswich fright