At that time the beautiful highlands between Lancaster and the Connecticut river were still an untrodden wilderness.  On their southern slope Worcester and Brookfield were tiny hamlets of a dozen houses each.  Up the Connecticut valley a line of little villages, from Springfield to Northfield, formed the remotest frontier of the English, and their exposed position offered tempting opportunities to the Indians.  Governor Leverett saw how great the danger would be if the other tribes should follow the example set by Philip, and Captain Edward Hutchinson was accordingly sent to Brookfield to negotiate with the Nipmucks.  This officer was eldest son of the unfortunate lady whose preaching in Boston nearly forty years before had been the occasion of so much strife.  Not only his mother, but all save one or two of his brothers and sisters —­and there were not less than twelve of them—­had been murdered by Indians on the New Netherland border in 1643; now the same cruel fate overtook the gallant captain.  The savages agreed to hold a parley and appointed a time and place for the purpose, but instead of keeping tryst they lay in ambush and slew Hutchinson with eight of his men on their way to the conference. [Sidenote:  Murder of Captain Hutchinson]

Three days afterward Philip, who had found home too hot for him, arrived in the Nipmuck country, and on the night of August 2, took part in a fierce assault on Brookfield.  Thirty or forty men, with some fifty women and children—­all the inhabitants of the hamlet—­took refuge in a large house, where they were besieged by 300 savages whose bullets pierced the wooden walls again and again.  Arrows tipped with burning rags were shot into the air in such wise as to fall upon the roof, but they who crouched in the garret were watchful and well supplied with water, while from the overhanging windows the volleys of musketry were so brisk and steady that the screaming savages below could not get near enough to the house to set it on fire.  For three days the fight was kept up, while every other house in the village was destroyed.  By this time the Indians had contrived to mount some planks on barrels so as to make a kind of rude cart which they loaded with tow and chips.  They were just about setting it on fire and preparing to push it against the house with long poles, when they were suddenly foiled by a heavy shower.  That noon the gallant Simon Willard, ancestor of two presidents of Harvard College, a man who had done so much toward building up Concord and Lancaster that he was known as the “founder of towns,” was on his way from Lancaster to Groton at the head of forty-seven horsemen, when he was overtaken by a courier with the news from Brookfield.  The distance was thirty miles, the road scarcely fit to be called a bridle-path, and Willard’s years were more than threescore-and-ten; but by an hour after sunset he had gallopped into Brookfield and routed the Indians who fled to a swamp ten miles distant. [Sidenote:  Attack on Brookfield]