Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/186

162 murderers of her babe, effect thus her own deliverance, and rejoin her husband and children, if haply they were yet alive? One night, when now more than a hundred miles from Haverhill, having prevailed upon the nurse and a boy, also a prisoner, to join her, this brave woman arose, and with only such help as this, dispatched all the Indians with their own hatchets, except two of the youngest, took their scalps, and retraced the long journey through the woods back to Haverhill.

Through such trying scenes as these, were the mothers of our people called upon to pass.

Frontenac still continued his struggle with the Iroquois. Although now seventy-four years old, he personally conducted an expedition, and carried the wars into the territory of the Onondagas and Oneidas, cutting up their corn and burning their villages. It was a melancholy spectacle to see a man of noble descent, and of heroic spirit, himself near the end of life, giving his sanction to torture an Indian prisoner, a hundred years old, with all the refinements of savage cruelty! "A most singular spectacle indeed it was," says Charlevoix "to see upwards of four hundred tormentors raging about a decrepit old man, from whom, by all their tortures, they could not extract a single groan, and who, as long as he lived, did not cease to reproach them with being slaves of the French, of whom he affected to speak with the utmost disdain. On receiving at last his death-stroke, he exclaimed, 'Why shorten my life? better improve this opportunity of learning how to die like a man!'"

The last year of the war was very trying. A severe winter and very great scarcity of provisions were aggravated by a constant apprehension of attack on Boston by a French fleet; but happily no result came of this expedition; and towards the close of 1697, the peace of Ryswick was proclaimed, and the first intercolonial war was brought to an end.

Each party, by the terms of the treaty, retained the territories possessed before the war, thus leaving the colonial dependencies of both nations in much the same position as they were antecedent to the severe struggle, save that a spirit of deadly hatred had been engendered, which was ready to break out into active cruelty at any favorable moment. 