reader to
look at the pictures we are about to sketch, with less surprise than he
might otherwise feel; and a few additional explanations may carry him
back in imagination to the precise condition of society that we desire
to delineate. It is matter of history that the settlements on the
eastern shores of the Hudson, such as Claverack, Kinderhook, and even
Poughkeepsie, were not regarded as safe from Indian incursions a century
since; and there is still standing on the banks of the same river, and
within musket-shot of the wharves of Albany, a residence of a younger
branch of the Van Rensselaers, that has loopholes constructed for
defence against the same crafty enemy, although it dates from a period
scarcely so distant. Other similar memorials of the infancy of the
country are to be found, scattered through what is now deemed the very
centre of American civilization, affording the plainest proofs that all
we possess of security from invasion and hostile violence is the growth
of but little more than the time that is frequently fulfilled by a
single human life.

The incidents of this tale occurred between the years 1740 and 1745,
when the settled portions of the colony of New York were confined to
the four Atlantic counties, a narrow belt of country on each side of the
Hudson, extending from its mouth to the falls near its head, and to
a few advanced "neighborhoods" on the Mohawk and the Schoharie. Broad
belts of the virgin wilderness not only reached the shores of the first
river, but they even crossed it, stretching away into New England, and
affording forest covers to the noiseless moccasin of the native warrior,
as he trod the secret and bloody war-path. A bird's-eye view of the
whole region east of the Mississippi must then have offered one
vast expanse of woods, relieved by a comparatively narrow fringe of
cultivation along the sea, dotted by the glittering surfaces of lakes,
and intersected by the waving lines of river. In such a vast picture of
solemn solitude, the district of country we design to paint sinks into
insignificance, though we feel encouraged to proceed by the conviction
that, with slight and immaterial distinctions, he who succeeds in giving
an accurate idea of any portion of this wild region must necessarily
convey a tolerably correct notion of the whole.

Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the
seasons is unbroken. Summer and winter, seed-time and harvest, return i