Yonder, on Conimicut Point, he built his block-house,[3] and therein defied for a day and a night the force of Puritans and savages in equal numbers, aggregating more than four times his own, which Massachusetts sent against him; finally surrendering to superior battalions to prevent blood-shed. Farther south, at the head of Warwick Cove, a quiet arm of the Narragansett, stood his humble homestead, where he passed his declining years in the honorable service of the Town and Commonwealth which he helped to found; the land surrounding which has remained in unbroken succession in the hands of his descendants to the present day. Near by, John Greene, John Wickes, Randall Holden and the other men, good and true, who were his colleagues and supporters, cleared and tilled their allotted acres, making the wilderness to blossom as the rose. Yes, there are after all some reminders of these primitive times besides the sub-soil and the ancient cedar by the Potowomut River; for yonder, at Rocky Point, the perennial clambake celebrates in aboriginal fashion and in their native haunts, the shore-feasts of the Indians. And down on Potowomut Neck which Warwick won for her own after long and litigious struggles, once the favorite camping ground of the aborigines, you may still pick up the flint arrow-heads which they fashioned and left behind them three centuries ago. You may paddle up the Pawtuxet, under the over-arching branches of noble trees, into quiet reaches of the river, where the hum of cities and the bustle of civilization seem remote indeed. And in the new Town Hall at Apponaug you may shut out the noises of the day, and curiously con the ancient records of the Town;—you may see the very pages on which these pioneers of a new civilization bore testimony to their humble beginnings, and told, in part, the story of the building of a State. I have searched these records faithfully—here, and in the library of the Historical Society at Providence, where other precious manuscripts are preserved. Some of these men I have come to know. I have thought their thoughts after them in deciphering their writings. I have felt their throbbing human hearts, laboring to lay the foundations of a Commonwealth wherein liberty should be secure under the protection of law; wherein the civil power should have no control over the consciences of men. Something of this would I lay before the impartial reader; in justice to these men who so labored that we might enter into their labors and reap the ripe fruits thereof; in justice also to ourselves, that we as American citizens may not remain ignorant of this forgotten chapter in the noble story of the beginnings of our National life. II SOURCES OF INFORMATION