y patting the hand he had laid on her knee.

"Indeed, we all love you dearly, grandma," exclaimed Ned. "But, now,
please won't you go on and tell us some more? Tell about the Indians,
and what they and the white folks did to each other."

"I could not tell all that was done, nor would it be a pleasant story
if I could," replied Grandma Elsie. "The Esopus Indians lived on the
flats extending northward from the creek for some distance. They did
not fancy their white neighbors, and determined to kill them. They
fell upon the settlement one day while the able-bodied men were in the
field and slew sixty-five persons. The others fled to the redoubt, and
the Indians began to build a stockade near it. But a call for help was
sent to New York, and the Governor sent troops, who drove the Indians
back to the mountains. Not long afterward the Dutch followed the
Indians into their fastnesses, destroyed their forts and villages,
laid waste their fields, burned their stores of maize, killed many of
their warriors, captured eleven of them, and released twenty-two of
the Dutch whom they were holding captives. All that led to a truce the
next December and a treaty of peace the following May."

"Were the Huguenots there when all that happened, grandma?" asked
Eric.

"No; as I have told you, it was the revocation of the Edict of Nantes
which drove them from their native land to this foreign shore, and
that did not take place until 1685--more than twenty years later."

"Were the Indians all gone from about Kingston by that time, grandma?"
asked Eric.

"Oh, no!" she said. "They as well as the Tories gave a great deal of
trouble to the Patriots during the Revolutionary War--that hard
struggle for freedom. At the time of the Revolution the New York
Legislature, then called 'Convention of the Representatives of the
State of New York,' migrated from place to place, being compelled to
do so by the movements of the enemy, and finally, in February, 1777,
took up their quarters in Kingston until May of that year. They were
making a Constitution for the State. It proved a very excellent one,
and was adopted. And the first session of the legislature of the State
was appointed to meet at Kingston in July. So Kingston was the capital
of the State when Sir Henry Clinton took the forts in the Hudson
Highlands; and because it was the capital he marked it out for special
vengeance.

"The British fleet, under Sir James Wallace, came up the river with