oyness and coldness by a
hearty embrace.

Our own paternal ancestor, owing to religious scruples in the matter of
taking arms even for defence of life and property, refused to leave his
undefended house and enter the garrison. The Indians frequently came to
his house; and the family more than once in the night heard them
whispering under the windows, and saw them put their copper faces to the
glass to take a view of the apartments. Strange as it may seen, they
never offered any injury or insult to the inmates.

In 1695 the township was many times molested by Indians, and several
persons were killed and wounded. Early in the fall a small party made
their appearance in the northerly part of the town, where, finding two
boys at work in an open field, they managed to surprise and capture them,
and, without committing further violence, retreated through the woods to
their homes on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee. Isaac Bradley, aged
fifteen, was a small but active and vigorous boy; his companion in
captivity, Joseph Whittaker, was only eleven, yet quite as large in size,
and heavier in his movements. After a hard and painful journey they
arrived at the lake, and were placed in an Indian family, consisting of a
man and squaw and two or three children. Here they soon acquired a
sufficient knowledge of the Indian tongue to enable them to learn from
the conversation carried on in their presence that it was designed to
take them to Canada in the spring. This discovery was a painful one.
Canada, the land of Papist priests and bloody Indians, was the especial
terror of the New England settlers, and the anathema maranatha of Puritan
pulpits. Thither the Indians usually hurried their captives, where they
compelled them to work in their villages or sold them to the French
planters. Escape from thence through a deep wilderness, and across lakes
and mountains and almost impassable rivers, without food or guide, was
regarded as an impossibility. The poor boys, terrified by the prospect
of being carried still farther from their home and friends, began to
dream of escaping from their masters before they started for Canada. It
was now winter; it would have been little short of madness to have chosen
for flight that season of bitter cold and deep snows. Owing to exposure
and want of proper food and clothing, Isaac, the eldest of the boys, was
seized with a violent fever, from which he slowly recovered in the course
of the winter