made more desolate than the howling wilderness from which it had been laboriously conquered.  He was spared to see dear neighbors and kindred massacred in every method of revolting atrocity, and their wives and children carried into loathsome captivity by foes more relentlessly cruel than wolves.  When now weighed down with age and bodily infirmities, the rest he had thought won was to be denied him, and he and his were driven from the ashes of pleasant homes—­about which clustered the memories of thirty years’ joys and sorrows—­to beg shelter from the charity of strangers.  For more than three years his enforced banishment endured.  In October 1679, John Prescott with his sons John and Jonathan, his sons-in-law Thomas Sawyer and John Rugg, his grand-son Thomas Sawyer, Jr. and his neighbor’s John Moore, Thomas Wilder, and Josiah White, petitioned the Middlesex Court for permission to resettle the town, and their prayer was granted.  Soon most of the inhabitants who had survived the massacre and exile, were busily building new homes, some upon the cinders of the old, others upon their second division lands east of the rivers where they were less exposed to the stealthy incursions of their savage enemies.  The two John Prescotts rebuilt the mills and dwelt there.  Whether the pioneer’s life long helpmate died before their settlement, in exile, or shortly after the return, has not been ascertained, but it would seem that he survived her.  Jonathan having married a second wife remained in Concord.  For two years the old man lived with his eldest son, seeing the Nashaway Valley blooming with the fruits of civilized labor; seeing new families filling the woeful gaps made in the old by Philip’s warriors; seeing children and grandchildren grasping the implements that had fallen from the nerveless hold of the earliest bread-winners, with hopeful and pertinacious purpose to extend the paternal domain; seeing too, may we not trust, from the Pisgah height of prophetic vision the glorious promise awaiting this his Canaan; these softly rounded hills and broad valleys dotted with the winsome homes of thousands of freemen; churches and schools, shops of artisans, and busy marts of trade clustered about his mill site; and, above all, seeing the assertion of political freedom and liberty of conscience which Governor John Winthrop had reproached him for favoring in the petition of Robert Child, become the corner stone of a giant republic.

No record of John Prescott’s death is found; but when upon his death bed, feeling that the changed condition of his own and his son Jonathan’s affairs required some modification of the will made in 1673, he summoned two of his townsmen to hear his nuncupative codicil to that document.  From the affidavit, here appended, it is certain that his death occurred about the middle of December, 1681.