The Courtship of Miles Standish:: With Suggestions for Study and Notes — John Shaqi
The Courtship of Miles Standish:: With Suggestions for Study and NotesLongfellow, Henry Wadsworth
History
The Courtship of Miles Standish:: With Suggestions for Study and Notes
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
Massachusetts -- History -- New Plymouth, 1620-1691 -- Poetry; Standish, Myles, 1584?-1656 -- Poetry
Shouting, ‘Who is there here to fight with the brave Wattawamat?’”
Then he unsheathed his knife, and, whetting the blade on his left
hand,
Held it aloft and displayed a woman’s face on the handle,
Saying, with bitter expression and look of sinister meaning:
“I have another at home, with the face of a man on the handle; 780
By-and-by they shall marry; and there will be plenty of children!”
Then stood Pecksuot forth, self-vaunting, insulting Miles Standish;
While with his fingers he patted the knife that hung at his bosom,
Drawing it half from its sheath, and plunging it back, as he muttered,
“By-and-by it shall see; it shall eat; ah, ha! but shall speak
not! 785
This is the mighty Captain the white men have sent to destroy us!
He is a little man; let him go and work with the women!”
Meanwhile Standish had noted the faces and figures of Indians
Peeping and creeping about from bush to tree in the forest,
Feigning to look for game, with arrows set on their bowstrings, 790
Drawing about him still closer and closer the net of their ambush.
But undaunted he stood, and dissembled and treated them smoothly;
So the old chronicles say, that were writ in the days of the fathers.
But when he heard their defiance, the boast, the taunt, and the
insult,
All the hot blood of his race, of Sir Hugh and of Thurston de
Standish, 795
Boiled and beat in his heart, and swelled in the veins of his temples.
Headlong he leaped on the boaster, and, snatching his knife from
its scabbard,
Plunged it into his heart, and, reeling backward, the savage
Fell with his face to the sky, and a fiendlike fierceness upon it.
Straight there arose from the forest the awful sound of the
war-whoop, 800
And, like a flurry of snow on the whistling wind of December,
Swift and sudden and keen came a flight of feathery arrows.
Then came a cloud of smoke, and out of the cloud came the lightning,
Out of the lightning thunder; and death unseen ran before it.
Frightened, the savages fled for shelter in swamp and in thicket, 805
Hotly pursued and beset; but their sachem, the brave Wattawamat,
Fled not; he was dead. Unswerving and swift had a bullet
Passed through his brain, and he fell with both hands clutching the
greensward,
Seeming in death to hold back from his foe the land of his fathers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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