Incredible As This May Appear, I Have
Heard It Asserted In A Thousand Instances, Among Persons Of Credit.
In The Village Of - - - , Where I Purpose To Go, There Lived, About
Fifteen Years Ago, An Englishman And A Swede, Whose History Would
Appear Moving, Had I Time To Relate It.
They were grown to the age
of men when they were taken; they happily escaped the great
punishment of war captives, and were obliged to marry the Squaws who
had saved their lives by adoption.
By the force of habit, they
became at last thoroughly naturalised to this wild course of life.
While I was there, their friends sent them a considerable sum of
money to ransom themselves with. The Indians, their old masters,
gave them their choice, and without requiring any consideration,
told them, that they had been long as free as themselves. They chose
to remain; and the reasons they gave me would greatly surprise you:
the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, the absence of those
cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us; the
peculiar goodness of the soil they cultivated, for they did not
trust altogether to hunting; all these, and many more motives, which
I have forgot, made them prefer that life, of which we entertain
such dreadful opinions. It cannot be, therefore, so bad as we
generally conceive it to be; there must be in their social bond
something singularly captivating, and far superior to anything to be
boasted of among us; for thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we
have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice
become Europeans!
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 271 of 291
Words from 73946 to 74218
of 79752
