The old promoter of the plot;
We'll stick a pitchfork in his back,
And throw him in the fire!"

There is a slight savor of a Smithfield roasting about these lines, such
as regaled the senses of the Virgin Queen or Bloody Mary, which entirely
reconciles us to their disuse at the present time.

It should be the fervent prayer of all good men that the evil spirit of
religious hatred and intolerance, which on the one hand prompted the
gunpowder plot, and which on the other has ever since made it the
occasion of reproach and persecution of an entire sect of professing
Christians, may be no longer perpetuated. In the matter of exclusiveness
and intolerance, none of the older sects can safely reproach each other;
and it becomes all to hope and labor for the coming of that day when the
hymns of Cowper and the Confessions of Augustine, the humane philosophy
of Channing and the devout meditations of Thomas a Kempis, the simple
essays of Woolman and the glowing periods of Bossuet, shall be regarded
as the offspring of one spirit and one faith,--lights of a common altar,
and precious stones in the temple of the one universal Church.

THE BOY CAPTIVES. AN INCIDENT OF THE INDIAN WAR OF 1695.

The township of Haverhill, even as late as the close of the seventeenth
century, was a frontier settlement, occupying an advanced position in the
great wilderness, which, unbroken by the clearing of a white man,
extended from the Merrimac River to the French villages on the St.
Francois. A tract of twelve miles on the river and three or four
northwardly was occupied by scattered settlers, while in the centre of
the town a compact village had grown up. In the immediate vicinity there
were but few Indians, and these generally peaceful and inoffensive. On
the breaking out of the Narragansett war, the inhabitants had erected
fortifications and taken other measures for defence; but, with the
possible exception of one man who was found slain in the woods in 1676,
none of the inhabitants were molested; and it was not until about the
year 1689 that the safety of the settlement was seriously threatened.
Three persons were killed in that year. In 1690 six garrisons were
established in different parts of the town, with a small company of
soldiers attached to each. Two of these houses are still standing. They
were built of brick, two stories high, with a single outside door, so
small and narrow that but one