Who First, No
Doubt, Listened With Their Red Ears Out Of A Natural Hospitality
And Courtesy, And Afterward From Curiosity
Or even interest, till
at length there were "praying Indians," and, as the General Court
wrote to Cromwell, the "work
Is brought to this perfection, that
some of the Indians themselves can pray and prophesy in a
comfortable manner."
It was in fact an old battle and hunting ground through which we
had been floating, the ancient dwelling-place of a race of
hunters and warriors. Their weirs of stone, their arrowheads and
hatchets, their pestles, and the mortars in which they pounded
Indian corn before the white man had tasted it, lay concealed in
the mud of the river bottom. Tradition still points out the
spots where they took fish in the greatest numbers, by such arts
as they possessed. It is a rapid story the historian will have
to put together. Miantonimo, - Winthrop, - Webster. Soon he comes
from Montaup to Bunker Hill, from bear-skins, parched corn, bows
and arrows, to tiled roofs, wheat-fields, guns and swords.
Pawtucket and Wamesit, where the Indians resorted in the fishing
season, are now Lowell, the city of spindles and Manchester of
America, which sends its cotton cloth round the globe. Even we
youthful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village of
Chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard, was its
obscure north district only, and the giant weaver was not yet
fairly born. So old are we; so young is it.
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