During all this wearisome contention in Boston, there is a glimpse of the humaner, and perhaps more godly, spirit in the gathering of men together under the lead of Joseph Marion to effect the insuring of neighbors’ worldly possessions from the chances of fire and the sea. It is not unlikely that this first trial of a system which to-day contributes so much to the sum of our happiness began then to indicate that mutual helpfulness might conduce as much to Christian comfort as keeping eyes alert for “scandalous libels.” But there was no way yet, except by keeping other eyes alert along a musket barrel, to meet the dangers of the frontier. When the authorities erected (1724) Fort Dummer[253] near a spot where Brattleboro’ now stands, they made the first English settlement in what is to-day Vermont. On the 22d of August (1724), as Sewall records, “the ‘Sheerness’ comes up and Captain Harmon with his Neridgwack scalps, at which there is great shouting and triumph. The Lord help us to rejoice with trembling!” Another diary of the day makes these scalps twenty-eight, one of them Bombazeen’s, and another that of “fryer Railes,”—and this is the shape in which the tidings came to Boston of that quick onset at Norridgewock, when the Jesuit Sebastian Rasle fell among his Indian neophytes, ten days before this.[254] In May of the next year, Lovewell the borderer made his last fight at Fryeburg in Maine, and the news reached Boston on the 13th of the same month. The ballad of Pigwacket, commemorating that bloody work, passed into the popular memory, and abided there for many a year.[255] In the following November four eastern sagamores came to Boston, and what is known as Dummer’s treaty was signed there on December 16, and the next summer (August 6) it was ratified at Falmouth (Portland). There was to be little disturbance of the peace thus consummated for a score of years to come. The war had borne heavily on Massachusetts. In such money as they had, it had during its four years’ continuance cost £240,000, and when the assembly voted an issue of another £50,000 of bills, Dummer, under royal instructions, withheld his approval. His fidelity cost him his salary for a while, which the House refused to vote until some compromise was reached. While this quieting of the eastern frontier was in progress, the western settlements of Massachusetts were being pushed across the mountains beyond the Connecticut, and the peopling of Berkshire began at Sheffield in 1725. The leading agents in this movement were Col. Jacob Wendell, of Boston, and Col. Jonathan Stoddard, of Northampton. The occupation proved a barrier against the Dutch of New York, though it was sixteen years before the next settlement was made in the Housatonic valley at Pittsfield.[256] [Illustration: MATHER BYLES.