motionless corpses, in what ghastly attitudes, lay huddled in the darksome
rooms of the little houses, or were tossed upon the trodden snow without,
the looks of mortal agony frozen on their features? But you will hear the
howl of the wolves by-and-by; and the black bear will come shuffling and
sniffing through the broken doors; and when the frightful feast is over,
there will be, in place of these poses of death, only disordered heaps of
gnawed bones, and shreds of garments rent asunder, and the grin of
half-eaten skulls. Nothing else remains of a happy and innocent community.
Why were they killed? Had they harmed their killers? Was any military
advantage gained by their death?--They had harmed no one, and nothing was
gained, or pretended to be gained, by their murder: nothing except to
establish the principle that, since two countries in Europe were at war,
those emigrants of theirs who had voyaged hither in quest of peace and
happiness should lie in wait to destroy one another. Human sympathies
have, sometimes, strange ways of avouching themselves.

People become accustomed even to massacre. But the children born in these
years, who were themselves to be the fathers and mothers of the generation
of the Revolution, must have sucked in stern and fierce qualities with the
milk from their mothers' breasts. No one, even in the midst of
Massachusetts, was safe during that first decade of the Eighteenth
Century. A single Indian, in search of glory, would spend weeks in
creeping southward from the far border; he would await his chance long and
patiently; he would leap out, and strike, and vanish again, leaving that
silent horror behind him. Such deeds, and the constant possibility of
them, left their mark upon the whole population. They grew up familiar
with violent death in its most terrible forms. The effect of Indian
warfare upon the natures of those who engage in it, or are subjected to
its perils, is different from that of what we must call civilized
fighting. The end as well as the aim of the Indian's battle is death--a