"It is now thirteen years--it was in 'forty-four and I was nineteen--when war broke out between the English and the French, which they call King George's war. Neither the English nor the French could raise many men, so they had to rely on the Indians, each party trying by every means to win them to itself and set them against the opposite party. Now, the English had a treaty of a long standing with the Six Nations; but at this time they also began to waver and to unite with the French, who knew better how to flatter them. So many fell away, and entered into secret or open partnership with our foes. The uncertainty daily increased. Nobody had any assurance of his life. The Germans here on the Mohawk, and especially on the creek, had hitherto escaped; but the danger came nearer and nearer to us, and then it was that we went to our work with a rifle on the shoulder, and when father, with the help of a couple of blacks from Virginia--secured for the occasion--strengthened the block-house as it is now. Before, it was more open. "Nicolas Herkimer settled on the Mohawk, and several others followed his example. Most of them, however, took the matter more lightly, and said the French or Indians should only come on; they would soon show them the road, and send them home with bloody heads. About this they debated with Uncle Ditmar, and became angry at him since he was always full of courage and of bitter hatred of the French whom he had already learned to know on the other side, where they had burned his parents' house and driven them from their home. He thought that should we wait until the French came to us it would be altogether too late. It was a shame that now everybody should think only of himself. All should assemble here, and on the Mohawk, and on the Schoharie; that no one should stay at home who could fire off a rifle, and that some should go to meet the French, and pay them back, in their own territory, what before and since they have done to us. Perhaps the old man was right, but nobody listened to him. Then came the year 'forty-six, when the French with their Indians swept through the valley of the Mohawk as far as Schenectady and Albany, and destroyed and robbed what they found, and killed and scalped what came in their way, and committed every conceivable horror. My uncle could stand it no longer. He went out with his four sons--my cousins--of whom the eldest was twenty-six and the youngest nineteen. Aunt Ursul would not stay at home, but went along, with her rifle on her shoulder, just as you saw her awhile ago, and they carried on war by themselves and killed many French and Indians, until they were resting on a certain day among a small clump of trees on the open prairie and, not noticing, were overrun from all sides. There my aunt saw her sons fall, one after the other, while she was loading the guns. At last old Ditmar was struck by a stray bullet and sank at her feet apparently dead. Aunt Ursul fired off the gun she had