The old writers[4] tell how Long Island was once the happy hunting ground of wolves and Indians, the playing place of deer and wild turkeys; and how the seals, the turtles, grampuses and pelicans loved its long, quiet beaches. Seals and whales are still occasional visitors, and its coasts are rich in lore of wrecks, of pirates and of buried treasure. A hundred years ago it could boast of hamlets only less remote from civilisation than are to-day the villages of that other "Long Island"--the group of the Outer Hebrides--which, for an equal distance, extends along the Scottish coast from Butt of Lewis to Barra Head. The desultory stage then occupied a week on the double journey between Brooklyn and Sag Harbour. Beyond the latter, Montauk Point thrusts its lighthouse some fifteen miles out into the Atlantic breakers. Here the last Indians of the island lingered on their reservation, and here the whalers watched for the spouting of their prey in the offing. A ridge of hills runs along the island near the northern shore, rising here and there into heights of three or four hundred feet which command the long gradual slope of woods and meadows to the south, with the distant sea beyond them; to the north, across the narrow Sound, rises the blue coast line of Connecticut. * * * * * It is on the slopes below the highest of these points of wide vision that the Whitman homestead lies, one of the pleasant farms of a land which has always been mainly agricultural. Large areas of the island are poor and barren, covered still with scrub and "kill-calf" or picturesque pine forest, as in the Indian days. But the land here is productive. From the wooded head of Jayne's Hill behind the farm, the township of Huntington stretches to the coast where it possesses a harbour. It was all purchased from the Indians in 1653, for six coats, six bottles, six hatchets, six shovels, ten knives, six fathom of wampum, thirty muxes, and thirty needles.[5] The Indians themselves do not seem to have caused much anxiety to the settlers; but a generation later, it is recorded that in a single year no fewer than fifteen of the wolves, which they had formerly kept half-tamed, were killed by the citizens of Huntington. The next troublers of the peace were the British troops. For here, a century later, during the last years of the War of Independence, Colonel Thompson of His Majesty's forces pulled down the Presbyterian Church, and with its timbers erected a fortress in the public burying-ground, his soldiers employing the gravestones for fire-places and ovens.[6] They seem to have occupied another meeting-house as a stable. Such are the everyday incidents of a military occupation; arising out of them, claims to the amount of £7,000 were preferred against the colonel by the township; but he withdrew to England, where, as Count Rumford, he afterwards became famous upon more peaceful fields.