being a carpenter, to build the great man an English house; and two hundred pounds for the purchase of Indian territory. The terms of the purchase were soon agreed upon, and Yeardley's people "paid for three great rivers and also all such others as they should like of, southerly." In due form they took possession of the country in the name of the Commonwealth of England, receiving as a symbol of its surrender, a turf of earth with an arrow shot into it. The territory thus given up by the Indians was a considerable part of what afterwards became the province of North Carolina. As soon as the natives had withdrawn from it to a region farther south, Yeardley built the great commander a handsome house, which he promised to fit up with English utensils and furniture. Yeardley's people were introduced to the chief of the Tuscaroras, who received them courteously, and invited them to visit his country, of which he gave an attractive account; but his offer could not be accepted, owing to the illness of their interpreter. Upon the completion of his house, the Roanoke chief came, with the Tuscarora chief and forty-five others, to Yeardley's house, presented his wife and son and himself for baptism, and offered again the same symbol of the surrender of his whole country to Yeardley; and he in his turn tendering the same to the Commonwealth of England, prayed only "that his own property and pains might not be forgotten." The Indian child was presented to the minister before the congregation, and having been baptized in their presence, was left with Yeardley to be bred a Christian, "which God grant him grace (he prays) to become." The charges incurred by Yeardley in purchasing and taking possession of the country, had already amounted to three hundred pounds.[228:A] At the meeting of the assembly in November, 1654, William Hatcher being convicted of having stigmatized Colonel Edward Hill, speaker of the house, as an atheist and blasphemer, (from which charges he had been before acquitted by the quarterly court,) was compelled to make acknowledgment of his offence, upon his knees, before Colonel Hill and the assembly. This Hatcher appears to have been a burgess of Henrico County in 1652. More than twenty years afterwards, in his old age, he was fined eight thousand pounds of pork, for the use of the king's soldiers, on account of alleged mutinous words uttered shortly after Bacon's rebellion.