inst us. Hereupon, Goodwife Stone twirled
her spindle very spitefully, and said she would as soon pity the Devil
as his children. The thought of her mangled little girl, and of her
dying son, did seem to overcome her, and she dropped her thread, and
cried out with an exceeding bitter cry,--"Oh, the bloody heathen! Oh,
my poor murdered Molly! Oh, my son, my son!"--"Nay, mother," said the
sick man, reaching out his hand and taking hold of his mother's, with a
sweet smile on his pale face,--"what does Christ tell us about loving
our enemies, and doing good to them that do injure us? Let us forgive
our fellow-creatures, for we have all need of God's forgiveness. I used
to feel as mother does," he said, turning to us; "for I went into the
war with a design to spare neither young nor old of the enemy.

"But I thank God that even in that dark season my heart relented at the
sight of the poor starving women and children, chased from place to
place like partridges. Even the Indian fighters, I found, had sorrows
of their own, and grievous wrongs to avenge; and I do believe, if we had
from the first treated them as poor blinded brethren, and striven as
hard to give them light and knowledge, as we have to cheat them in
trade, and to get away their lands, we should have escaped many bloody
wars, and won many precious souls to Christ."

I inquired of him concerning his captivity. He was wounded, he told me,
in a fight with the Sokokis Indians two years before. It was a hot
skirmish in the woods; the English and the Indians now running forward,
and then falling back, firing at each other from behind the trees. He
had shot off all his powder, and, being ready to faint by reason of a
wound in his knee, he was fain to sit down against an oak, from whence
he did behold, with great sorrow and heaviness of heart, his companions
overpowered by the number of their enemies, fleeing away and leaving him
to his fate. The savages soon came to him with dreadful whoopings,
brandishing their hatchets and their scalping-knives. He thereupon
closed his eyes, expecting to be knocked in the head, and killed
outright. But just then a noted chief coming up in great haste, bade
him be of good cheer, for he was his prisoner, and should not be slain.
He proved to be the famous Sagamore Squando, the chief man of the
Sokokis.

"And were you kindly treated by this chief?" asked Rebecca.

"I suffered much in moving with him to the Sebago Lake, ow