According To The Historian, They Escaped As By A Miracle All
Roving Bands Of Indians, And Reached Their Homes In Safety, With
Their Trophies, For Which The General Court Paid Them Fifty
Pounds.
The family of Hannah Dustan all assembled alive once
more, except the infant whose brains were dashed out against the
apple-tree, and there have been many who in later times have
lived to say that they had eaten of the fruit of that apple-tree.
This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton
wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great
for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the
English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman
by the Greek. "We must look a long way back," says Raleigh, "to
find the Romans giving laws to nations, and their consuls bringing
kings and princes bound in chains to Rome in triumph; to see men
go to Greece for wisdom, or Ophir for gold; when now nothing
remains but a poor paper remembrance of their former condition."
And yet, in one sense, not so far back as to find the Penacooks
and Pawtuckets using bows and arrows and hatchets of stone, on
the banks of the Merrimack. From this September afternoon, and
from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more
remote than the dark ages. On beholding an old picture of
Concord, as it appeared but seventy-five years ago, with a fair
open prospect and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad
noon, I find that I had not thought the sun shone in those days,
or that men lived in broad daylight then.
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