and the brasses. They did not even make objection to gardening, keeping our walks and grass plots in excellent order and our rose vines well trained against the walls, but that, with their delight of fiddling at dances and singing of songs, was all that they would do willingly. Yet these minor troubles were but little and sank into nothingness beside the one great trouble, nay, the awful horror, that was always near us. I mean the Indians. Earlier, in the first Colonial days, the red men had dwelt in some semblance of friendship with our forerunners; they would live in peace with them, sleep by their firesides, eat from their platters, and teach them how to capture all the game of the forests and the fish of the waters. Yet, even then, all this harmony would be occasionally disturbed by a sudden outbreak on their part resulting in a dreadful massacre which, in its turn, resulted in a massacre on the part of the colonists in retaliation. So, as time went on, these two races, the white and red, which had once dwelt as friends together drew away from one another; the Indians retired further into the Alleghany mountains or even crossed them into the unknown land lying west of them, while the colonists made good their holdings on the eastern side of those mountains and defied the red men. But, still, the state of things was most dreadful--most horrible. For though the Indians had withdrawn, and, of late years, had made no great raid on the settlements in our part, one never knew when they were not meditating an attack upon some quiet manor like my own, or some peaceful village consisting of a few scattered houses, or even upon some small town. Men went armed always--at church every man's loaded firelock, or gun, reposed against the side of the pew in which he worshipped--no woman thought of going a mile away from home without an escort, and children who wandered into the woods would often disappear and never be heard of again. So that one would meet weeping mothers and sad-faced looking fathers who mourned their children as dead, nay, who would rather have mourned them as dead than have had to bow to the living fate that had o'ertaken them. For they never came back, or, if they came, 'twas in such a shape that they had better have died than have been taken. One, the child of John Trueby of Whitefountain, did indeed come back fifteen years after he had been stolen by the Shawnees, dressed and painted as an Indian of that tribe, but only to slay his own father with a tomahawk at the direction of those with whom he had become allied. Another, who had been stolen by the Doeg Indians, returned only to his native hamlet to set fire to it, beginning with the wooden frame-house in which his mother and sisters had mourned him for years. Who, therefore, should not tremble at the very name of Indian? Who that had a child should not kneel down and pray to God to take that child's life rather than let it fall into the hands of the savages, where its nature would