Page:A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.djvu/180

174 sufficient to chase ten Indians; many reckoned it was no other but Veni, vidi, vici." But we may conclude that the judicious would by this time have made a different observation.

Farwell appears to have been the only one who had studied his profession, and understood the business of hunting Indians. He lived to fight another day, for the next year he was Lovewell's Lieutenant at Pequawket, but that time, as we have related, left his bones in the wilderness. His name still reminds us of twilight days and forest scouts on Indian trails, with an uneasy scalp;—an indispensable hero to New England. As the more recent poet of Lovewell's fight has sung, halting a little but bravely still;—

These battles sound incredible to us. I think posterity will doubt if such things ever were; if our bold ancestors who settled this land were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a copper colored race of men. They were vapors, fever and ague of the unsettled woods. Now, only a few arrow-heads are turned up by the plow. In the Pelasgic, the Etruscan, or the British story, there is nothing so shadowy and unreal.

It is a wild and antiquated looking grave-yard, overgrown with bushes, on the high road, about a quarter of a mile from and overlooking the Merrimack, with a deserted