steps, and shrouded by the deep shade of midnight, he glided
from the gloomy depths of the woods. He stole on the
villages and settlements of New England, like the
pestilence, unseen and unheard. His dreadful agency was felt
when the yells of his followers roused his victims from
their slumbers, and when the flames of their blazing
habitations glared upon their eyes. His pathway could be
traced by the horrible desolation of its progress, by its
crimson print upon the snows and the sands, by smoke and
fire, by houses in ruins, by the shrieks of women, the
wailing of infants, and the groans of the wounded and the
dying. Well indeed might he have been called the 'terror of
New England.' Yet in no instance did he transcend the
ordinary usages of Indian warfare.

"We now sit in his seats and occupy his lands; the lands
which afforded a bare subsistence to a few wandering savages
can now support countless thousands of civilized people. The
aggregate of the happiness of man is increased, and the
designs of Providence are fulfilled when this fair domain is
held by those who know its use; surely we may be permitted
at this day to lament the fate of him who was once the lord
of our woods and our streams, and who, if he wrought much
mischief to our forefathers, loved some of our race, and
wept for their misfortunes!"

There was, however, but little sympathy felt in that day for Philip or
any of his confederates. The truly learned and pious but pedantic
Cotton Mather, allowing his spirit to be envenomed by the horrid
atrocities of Indian warfare, thus records the tragic end of
Pometacom:

"The Englishman's piece would not go off, but the Indians
presently shot him through his venomous and murderous heart.
And in that very place where he first contrived and
commenced his mischief, this Agag was now cut in quarters,
which were then hanged up, while his head was carried in
triumph to Plymouth, where it arrived on the very day that
the church was keeping a solemn thanksgiving to God. God
sent them in the head of a Leviathan for a thanksgiving
feast."

We must remember that the Indians have no chroniclers of their wrongs,
and yet the colonial historians furnish us with abundant incidental
evidence that outrages were perpetrated by individuals of the
colonists which were s