"Herod of Galilee's babe-butchering deed Lives not on history's blushing page alone; Our skies, it seems, have seen like victims bleed, And our own Ramahs echoed groan for groan; The fiends of France, whose cruelties decreed Those dexterous drownings in the Loire and Rhone, Were, at their worst, but copyists, second-hand, Of our shrined, sainted sires, the Plymouth Pilgrim band." One of the severest cruelties practised upon these inoffensive people, was that of requiring them to betray their friends, the Indians, under the heaviest penalties. In Acadia, the red and the white man were as brothers; no treachery, no broken faith, no over-reaching policy had severed the slightest fibre of good fellowship on either side. But the Abenaqui race was a warlike people. At the first invasion, under Argall, the red man had seen with surprise a mere handful of white men disputing for a territory to which neither could offer a claim; so vast as to make either occupation or control by the adventurers ridiculous; and therefore, with good-natured zeal, he had hastened to put an end to the quarrel, as though the white people had only been fractious but not irreconcilable kinsmen. But as the power of New England advanced more and more in Acadia, the first generous desire of the red man had merged into suspicion, and finally hatred of the peaked hat and ruff of Plymouth. In all his dealings with the Acadians, the Indian had found only unimpeachable faith and honor; but with the colonist of Massachusetts, there had been nothing but over-reaching and treachery: intercourse with the first had not led to a scratch, or a single drop of blood; while on the other hand a bounty of "one hundred pounds was offered for each male of their tribe if over twelve years of age, if scalped; one hundred and five pounds if taken prisoner; fifty pounds for each _woman and child scalped_, and fifty pounds when brought in alive." The Abenaqui tribes therefore, first, to avenge the injuries of their unresisting friends, the Acadians, and after to avenge their own, waged war upon the invaders with all the severities of an aggrieved and barbarous people. And, as I have said before, the severest cruelty inflicted upon the Acadian colonist, was to oblige him to betray his best friend and protector, the painted heathen, with whom he struck hands and plighted faith. To the honor of these colonists, be it said, that although they saw their long years' labor of dykes broken down, the sea sweeping over their farms, the fire rolling about their homesteads, their cattle and sheep destroyed, their effects plundered, and wanton and nameless outrages committed by the English and Yankee soldiery, yet in no instance did they purchase indemnity from these, by betraying a single Indian. CHAPTER XVII.