"Aunt Chloe, sir; she told me."

"And you really thought your grandfather wore a blanket embroidered with
beads, and ornamented his leggins with the scalps of his enemies?"

"Well, sir, I didn't think that exactly."

"Didn't think that exactly? Tom, you will be the death of me."

He hid his face in his handkerchief, and, when he looked up, he seemed
to have been suffering acutely. I was deeply moved myself, though I did
not clearly understand what I had said or done to cause him to feel so
badly. Perhaps I had hurt his feelings by thinking it even possible that
Grandfather Nutter was an Indian warrior.

My father devoted that evening and several subsequent evenings to giving
me a clear and succinct account of New England; its early struggles, its
progress, and its present condition--faint and confused glimmerings
of all which I had obtained at school, where history had never been a
favorite pursuit of mine.

I was no longer unwilling to go North; on the contrary, the proposed
journey to a new world full of wonders kept me awake nights. I promised
myself all sorts of fun and adventures, though I was not entirely at
rest in my mind touching the savages, and secretly resolved to go on
board the ship--the journey was to be made by sea--with a certain little
brass pistol in my trousers-pocket, in case of any difficulty with the
tribes when we landed at Boston.

I couldn't get the Indian out of my head. Only a short time previously