It Is A Door Through
Which They Can Enter Our Country Whenever They Please; And, As They
Seem Determined To Destroy The Whole Chain Of Frontiers, Our Fate
Cannot Be Far Distant:
From Lake Champlain, almost all has been
conflagrated one after another.
What renders these incursions still
more terrible is, that they most commonly take place in the dead of
the night; we never go to our fields but we are seized with an
involuntary fear, which lessens our strength and weakens our labour.
No other subject of conversation intervenes between the different
accounts, which spread through the country, of successive acts of
devastation; and these told in chimney-corners, swell themselves in
our affrighted imaginations into the most terrific ideas! We never
sit down either to dinner or supper, but the least noise immediately
spreads a general alarm and prevents us from enjoying the comfort of
our meals. The very appetite proceeding from labour and peace of
mind is gone; we eat just enough to keep us alive: our sleep is
disturbed by the most frightful dreams; sometimes I start awake, as
if the great hour of danger was come; at other times the howling of
our dogs seems to announce the arrival of the enemy: we leap out of
bed and run to arms; my poor wife with panting bosom and silent
tears, takes leave of me, as if we were to see each other no more;
she snatches the youngest children from their beds, who, suddenly
awakened, increase by their innocent questions the horror of the
dreadful moment. She tries to hide them in the cellar, as if our
cellar was inaccessible to the fire. I place all my servants at the
windows, and myself at the door, where I am determined to perish.
Fear industriously increases every sound; we all listen; each
communicates to the other his ideas and conjectures. We remain thus
sometimes for whole hours, our hearts and our minds racked by the
most anxious suspense: what a dreadful situation, a thousand times
worse than that of a soldier engaged in the midst of the most severe
conflict! Sometimes feeling the spontaneous courage of a man, I seem
to wish for the decisive minute; the next instant a message from my
wife, sent by one of the children, puzzling me beside with their
little questions, unmans me: away goes my courage, and I descend
again into the deepest despondency. At last finding that it was a
false alarm, we return once more to our beds; but what good can the
kind sleep of nature do to us when interrupted by such scenes!
Securely placed as you are, you can have no idea of our agitations,
but by hear-say; no relation can be equal to what we suffer and to
what we feel. Every morning my youngest children are sure to have
frightful dreams to relate: in vain I exert my authority to keep
them silent, it is not in my power; and these images of their
disturbed imagination, instead of being frivolously looked upon as
in the days of our happiness, are on the contrary considered as
warnings and sure prognostics of our future fate.
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