The Long House, in ruins, rang with the frantic wailing of four fierce nations. The Senecas screamed in their pain from the Western Gate; the Cayugas and Onondagas were singing the death song of their nations; the proud Keepers of the Eastern Gate, driven headlong into exile, gathered like bleeding panthers on the frontier, their glowing gaze intent and patient, watching the usurpers and marking them for vengeance and destruction. To me, personally, the conflict in my Northland had become unutterably horrible. Our battles in the Jerseys, in Pennsylvania, in Delaware, and farther south, held for me no such horror and repugnance; for if the panoply of war be dreadful, its pomp and circumstance make it endurable and to be understood by human beings. But to me there was something terrifying in secret ambush and ghastly massacre amid the eternal twilight of the Northern wilderness, where painted men stole through still places, intent on murder; where death was swift and silent, where all must watch and none dared rest; where children wept in their sleep, and mothers lay listening all night long, and hollow-eyed men cut their corn with sickle in one hand and rifle in the other. We, in the Jerseys, watching red-coat and Hessian, heard of scalps taken in the North from babies lying in their cradles--aye, the very watch-dog at the gate was scalped; and painted Tories threw their victims over rail fences to hang there, disembowelled, like dead game. We heard terrible and inhuman tales of Simon Girty, of Benjy Beacraft, of Billy Newbury--all old neighbours of mine, and now turned child-killers and murderers of helpless women--all painted men, now, ferocious and without mercy. But these men had never been more than ignorant peasants and dull tillers of the soil for thriftier masters. Yet they were no crueller than others of birth and education. And what was I to think of Walter Butler and other gentlemen of like condition,--officers who had delivered Tom Boyd of Derry to the Senecas,--Colonel Paris to the Mohawks! The day we heard that Sergeant Newbury and Henry Hare were taken, I thanked God on my knees. And when our General Clinton hung them both for human monsters as well as spies, then I thanked God again.... And wrote tenderly to Claudia, poor misguided girl!--condoling with her--not for her grief and the death of Henry Hare[45]--but that the black disgrace of it should so nearly touch and soil her. [Footnote 45: In the writer's possession is a letter written by the widow of Lieutenant Hare, retailing the circumstances of his execution and praying for financial relief from extreme poverty. General Sir Frederick Haldimand indorses the application in his own handwriting and recommends a pension. The widow mentions her six little children.]