Chapter 1

"I may disjoin my hand, but not my faith."

Shakespeare.

The incidents of this tale must be sought in a remote period of the annals
of America. A colony of self-devoted and pious refugees from religious
persecution had landed on the rock of Plymouth, less than half a century
before the time at which the narrative commences; and they, and their
descendants, had already transformed many a broad waste of wilderness into
smiling fields and cheerful villages. The labors of the emigrants had been
chiefly limited to the country on the coast, which, by its proximity to
the waters that rolled between them and Europe, afforded the semblance of
a connexion with the land of their forefathers and the distant abodes of
civilization. But enterprise, and a desire to search for still more
fertile domains, together with the temptation offered by the vast and
unknown regions that lay along their western and northern borders, had
induced many bold adventurers to penetrate more deeply into the forests.
The precise spot, to which we desire to transport the imagination of the
reader, was one of these establishments of what may, not inaptly, be
called the forlorn-hope, in the march of civilization through the country.

So little was then known of the great outlines of the American continent,
that, when the Lords Say and Seal, and Brooke, connected with a few
associates, obtained a grant of the territory which now composes the state
of Connecticut, the King of England affixed his name to a patent, which
constituted them proprietors of a country that should extend from the
shores of the Atlantic to those of the South Sea. Notwithstanding the
apparent hopelessness of ever subduing, or of even occupying a territory
like this, emigrants from the mother colony of Massachusetts were found
ready to commence the Herculean labor, within fifteen years from the day
when they had first put foot upon the well-known rock itself. The fort of
Say-Brooke, the towns of Windsor, Hartford, and New-Haven, soon sprang
into existence, and, from that period to this, the little community, which
then had birth, has been steadily, calmly, and prosperously advancing its
career, a model of order and reason, and the hive from which swarms of
industrious, hardy and enlightened yeomen have since spread themselves
over a surface so vast, as to create an impression that they still aspire
to the possession of the immense regions included in their original grant.

Among the religionists, whom disgust of persecution had early driven into
the voluntary exile of the colonies, was more than an usual proportion of
men of character and education. The reckless and the gay, younger sons,
soldiers unemployed, and students from the inns of court, early sought