The Afternoon Is Now Far Advanced, And A Fresh And Leisurely Wind
Is Blowing Over The River, Making Long Reaches
Of bright ripples.
The river has done its stint, and appears not to flow, but lie at
its length reflecting
The light, and the haze over the woods is
like the inaudible panting, or rather the gentle perspiration of
resting nature, rising from a myriad of pores into the attenuated
atmosphere.
On the thirty-first day of March, one hundred and forty-two years
before this, probably about this time in the afternoon, there
were hurriedly paddling down this part of the river, between the
pine woods which then fringed these banks, two white women and a
boy, who had left an island at the mouth of the Contoocook before
daybreak. They were slightly clad for the season, in the English
fashion, and handled their paddles unskilfully, but with nervous
energy and determination, and at the bottom of their canoe lay
the still bleeding scalps of ten of the aborigines. They were
Hannah Dustan, and her nurse, Mary Neff, both of Haverhill,
eighteen miles from the mouth of this river, and an English boy,
named Samuel Lennardson, escaping from captivity among the
Indians. On the 15th of March previous, Hannah Dustan had been
compelled to rise from child-bed, and half dressed, with one foot
bare, accompanied by her nurse, commence an uncertain march, in
still inclement weather, through the snow and the wilderness.
She had seen her seven elder children flee with their father, but
knew not of their fate.
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