These, and shrieks of fleeing maidens, Speechless children’s pleading tears, And the yelling of the savage, Made sweet music to your ears. Bloody Walter Butler! owning Brain of fire and heart of stone, Twenty deaths, could you endure them, Would not for these deeds atone. Nevermore may come your victims To the pleasant earth again— Never hear the blessed tidings— “Walter Butler has been slain!” III. When the savage had departed, Careless of the woe he caused, Then, amid the smouldering ruins, An Oneida came and paused. He was tall and gaunt and aged, Crowned his head with films of snow; For the frosts of seventy winters Thus had honored Skenando. Gazed he on the work of evil, Which around its traces spread, On the blood which stained the herbage, On the pale and mangled dead. “I have been,” so spake the chieftain, “Forty years the white man’s friend; So have been to Walter Butler— Would have proved so to the end. “Cruel son of lying father, Faithless, too, as this may show, You shall rue the dreadful doing Which creates in me a foe. “Here are friends—I knew and loved them, Proved them often in my need. Great Monedo’s curse be on you, Walter Butler, for this deed. “Here, by all his bitter sorrow, By his scant and whitened hairs, By the spirits of the fallen, Thus the old Oneida swears: “He will follow in your pathway, He will hang upon your track, Through the hurry of the foray, Through the battle’s awful rack, “Till at length his keen-edged hatchet, Driven to your coward brain, With its crashing voice shall utter, ‘Walter Butler has been slain!’” IV. In the waste of Cherry Valley Desolation long was seen, Seated on the heaps of ashes Where the home of man had been. Desolation there was sitting, Brooding on the fearful past, Crouching in the murky shadows Of her sullen pinions vast. There, amid the thorny briers, Mingled with the earth and stones, Hidden by the noxious herbage, Were the weather-whitened bones. On the branches of the maples Sat the houseless cocks, and crowed; In the forest’s dark recesses Starveling watch-dogs made abode. Through the copse-wood, snorting, scampered Herds of wild and savage swine; And with yellow deer there wandered What survived among the kine. In the fenceless fields the panther Crouched to spring upon his prey; And the rattlesnake lay basking Careless in the public way. Where had stood the barn and stable, And the garden with its bees; Where the house, with peakèd gable, Peeped through groves of locust-trees;