ouring the inhabitants as
fast as they were able to discover and swallow them. Seeing this, and
the danger to which they were exposed of becoming also food for the
monsters, they set about fortifying the high hill Gerundewagh, that
their lives might be safe from the appalling danger, and within their
fortification they collected all sorts of defensive materials. Having
made themselves tolerably secure, they had leisure to view the war of
extermination, which the snakes waged with the sons of the land who
were not thus protected.

In the mean time, the snakes, having discovered by their acute power
of smelling distant objects that the hill Gerundewagh contained human
bodies, with whose flesh they were now become much in love, they
immediately bent their course to it. In coming thither, they were
compelled to cross, or rather to come down the river Mohawk, which,
upon their thus getting lengthways of it, diverted from its natural
course, overflowed its banks, sweeping away every impediment, and
forming those beautiful meadows which have remained ever since covered
with a robe of green. Having at length reached the hill, around whose
base they threw themselves in many coils, they commenced the work of
death by poisoning the air with their pernicious breath. Soon the
atmosphere, which before had been pure, was changed in its nature;
appearances resembling the motions of the waves of the great lake
Superior when slightly agitated in the hot mornings of summer were
seen in the horizon, and have never left it. Before, the rains
descended in soft showers in the pauses of gentle winds, now they fell
in torrents, accompanied with howling tempests and cold hurricanes.
Lightnings, which before only played across the horizon, as the red
light of autumn evenings streaks the northern sky, now rent asunder
the flinty rock, and rived the knotty oak. Men, who had before died
only of old age, now poisoned by the breath of the monsters, fell sick
in the morning of life, with the brightness of youthful hope in their
eye, and the down of unripe years on their cheek. The hair now often
grew grey ere the knee became feeble; the teeth rotted out while there
was enough to put between them; the eye often failed to see the
beautiful objects, and the ear to drink in the soft sounds, which the
Great Master of all created for the food of each. The heart now grew
sometimes to be trembling and irresolute, and the soul to have its
visions of infelicity