It is almost two hundred and fifty years since Captain John Mason, at the head of ninety men, more than half of the fighting force of the Connecticut Colony, marched against Sassacus, and almost within bow-shot of where your Annual Meeting is to be held, fought the Pequods. It was the first Indian war in New England. Thomas Hooker, “the light of the Western Churches,” famed as “a son of thunder,” delivered to Mason the staff of command. The very learned and godly Stone spent nearly the whole night in importunate prayer for success to crown the expedition, which on the morrow sailed past the Thames, hoping by strategy to reach the Pequod fort unobserved. Under cover of night, the soldiers of Connecticut made the attack upon the Indians. “We must burn them,” shouted Mason, who himself cast a firebrand to the windward among the light mats of their cabins. The helpless natives climbed the palisades as their blazing encampment assisted the English marksmen in taking good aim. Six hundred Indians, men, women and children, perished, most of them in the hideous conflagration. Capt. Miles Standish had twenty years earlier slaughtered Witawamo and others of the Massachusetts tribe, the knowledge of which, as it reached the gentle spirited Robinson in Leyden, caused the pastor to write to Bradford, “concerning the killing of those poor Indians, of which we heard at first by report and since by more certain relation. Oh, how happy a thing had it been if you had converted some before you killed any.”