"Is the cool summer injuring your corn?" I pursued. "Snouted it, sir; snouted it." [Illustration: OLD GARRISON-HOUSE.] The Junkins's garrison is the first reached. It is on the brow of a high hill overlooking the river meadows, where, if good watch were kept, a foe could hardly have approached unseen. It can not survive much longer. It is dilapidated inside and out to a degree that every blast searches it through and through. The doors stood ajar; the floors were littered with corn-fodder, and a hen was brooding in a corner of the best room. Having served as dwelling and castle, it embodies the economy of the one with the security of the other. The chimney is of itself a tower; the floor timbers of the upper story project on all sides, so as to allow it to overhang the lower. This was a type of building imported from England by the early settlers, common enough in their day, and of which specimens are still extant in such of our older towns as Boston, Salem, and Marblehead. Its form admitted, however, of a good defense. The walls are of hewn timber about six inches thick, and bullet-proof. On the north-east, and where the timbers were ten inches thick, they have rotted away under their long exposure to the weather. I observed a loop-hole or two that had not been closed up, and that the roof frame was of oak, with the bark adhering to it.[80] In one room was an old hand-loom; in another a spinning-wheel lay overturned; and in the fire-place the iron crane, blackened with soot, was still fixed as it might have been when the garrison was beset in '92. Between the house and the road is the Junkins's family burying-ground. The house attracts many curious visitors, though it lacks its ancient warlike accessories, its lookouts, palisades, and flankarts. A few rods farther on, in descending the hill, is the M'Intire garrison. It is on the opposite side of the Berwick road from the house through which I have just hurried the reader; and, except that a newer addition has been joined to the garrison part, does not materially differ from it. Mr. M'Intire, now the owner of both houses, showed me an opening in the floor of the projection through which, according to the family tradition, boiling water was poured upon the heads of any who might try to force an entrance. It has been supposed that these two garrisons were erected as early as 1640 or 1650. As no motive existed for building such houses at that time, the tradition is not entitled to credit. Few of the Indians were possessed of fire-arms, as the sale to them was strictly prohibited in the English colonies. The digging up of the hatchet by the eastern Indians, in 1676, during Philip's war, probably first led to the building of fortified houses in all the sea-coast towns. During the attack of 1692, the four garrisons in York saved the lives of those they sheltered, while fifty of the defenseless inhabitants were killed outright, and one hundred and fifty were led prisoners to Canada.