Page:What cheer, or, Roger Williams in banishment (1896).pdf/205

 STANZA LIII.

''Awanux gave him strength, and, with strange fear, Did M'antonomi at the big guns start.''

"We cannot conceive," says Mourt in his journal, "but that he [Massasoit] is willing to have peace with us: for they have seen our people sometimes alone, two or three in the woods at work and fowling, whereas they offered them no harm: and especially, because he hath a potent adversary, the Narrohigansets, that are at war with him, against whom he thinks we may be of some strength to him; for our pieces are terrible unto them."

STANZA LXXIV.

''At length his vision opened on a space, Level and broad, and stretching without bound Southward afar—nor rose, o'er all its face, A tree, or shrub, or rock or swelling mound.''

It may excite our wonder that the barren plains of Seekonk should have been at first selected by our Founder for a place of settlement. But it is possible that at the time when the selection was made they were in a state, as to fertility, different from their present. However this may be, one thing is certain, that Williams made the selection during the winter, when vegetation afforded no criterion of the soil, whilst its very nakedness was in some respects a recommendation. It was an object with the early settlers to establish themselves in the neighborhood of some clearing, and particularly on meadows in the vicinity of rivers. These yielded pasturage through the summer, and forage for their cattle during winter, and land for tillage without the preparatory steps of clearing.