to the knife with the Red
Indian. Long before the time of Fenimore Cooper the English lad could
read stories of dreadful tortures, of heroic daring, of patience and
endurance, of revenges fierce, of daily and hourly peril. The blood of
the Dragon ran yet in English veins. America was still to the heirs
and successors of that Great Heart the Land of Romance and the Land of
Gallant Fights.

And such stories! That of Captain John Smith laying his head upon the
block that it might be smashed by the Indians' clubs, and of his
rescue by the Indian girl, afterwards the 'Princess Rebecca'; the
massacre of three hundred and fifty men, women and children of the
infant colony of Virginia, a hundred stories of massacre. Or, that
story of the mother's revenge, told, I believe, by Thoreau. Her name
was Hannah Dunstan. Her house was attacked by Indians; her husband and
her elder children fled for their lives; she, with an infant of a
fortnight, and her nurse, were left behind. The Indians dashed out the
brains of the baby and forced the two women to march with them through
the forest to their camp. Here they found an English boy, also a
prisoner. Hannah Dunstan made the boy find out from one of the Indians
the quickest way to strike with the tomahawk so as to kill and to
secure the scalp. The Indian told the boy. Now there were in the camp
two men, three women, and seven children. In the dead of night Hannah
got up, awakened her nurse and the boy, secured the tomahawks, and in
the way the unsuspecting Indian had taught the boy, she tomahawked
every one--man, woman and child--except a boy who fled into the
woods--and took their scalps. Then she scuttled all the canoes but
one, and taking the scalps with her as proof of her revenge, she put
the nurse and the boy into the canoe and paddled down the river. She
escaped all roving bands and won her way home again to find her
husband and sons safe and well, and to show the scalps--the blood
payment for her murdered child. Such were the stories told and retold
in every colonial township, round every fire; such were the stories
brought home by the sailors and the merchants; they were published in
books of travel. Think you that our English blood had grown so
sluggish that it could not be fired by such tales? Think you that the
romance of the Colonies was one whit less enthralling than the romance
of the Spanish Main?

I say nothing of the wars in which the British troops and the
Colonial,