In the routed army was the sturdy John Cleaveland, minister of Ipswich, and now chaplain of Bagley’s Massachusetts regiment, who regarded the retreat with a disgust that was shared by many others.  “This day,” he writes in his Diary, at the head of Lake George, two days after the battle, “wherever I went I found people, officers and soldiers, astonished that we left the French ground, and commenting on the strange conduct in coming off.”  From this time forth the provincials called their commander Mrs. Nabbycromby.[639] He thought of nothing but fortifying himself.  “Towards evening,” continues the chaplain, “the General, with his Rehoboam counsellors, came over to line out a fort on the rocky hill where our breastwork was last year.  Now we begin to think strongly that the grand expedition against Canada is laid aside, and a foundation made totally to impoverish our country.”  The whole army was soon intrenched.  The chaplain of Bagley’s, with his brother Ebenezer, chaplain of another regiment, one day walked round the camp and carefully inspected it.  The tour proved satisfactory to the militant divines, and John Cleaveland reported to his wife:  “We have built an extraordinary good breastwork, sufficient to defend ourselves against twenty thousand of the enemy, though at present we have not above a third part of that number fit for duty.”  Many of the troops had been sent to the Mohawk, and others to the Hudson.

[Footnote 639:  Trumbull, Hist.  Connecticut, II. 392.  “Nabby” (Abigail) was then a common female name in New England.]

In the regiment of which Cleaveland was chaplain there was a young surgeon from Danvers, Dr. Caleb Rea, who also kept a copious diary, and, being of a serious turn, listened with edification to the prayers and exhortations to which the yeoman soldiery were daily summoned.  In his zeal, he made an inquest among them for singers, and chose the most melodious to form a regimental choir, “the better to carry on the daily service of singing psalms;” insomuch that the New England camp was vocal with rustic harmony, sincere, if somewhat nasal.  These seemly observances were not inconsistent with a certain amount of disorder among the more turbulent spirits, who, removed from the repressive influence of tight-laced village communities, sometimes indulged in conduct which grieved the conscientious surgeon.  The rural New England of that time, with its narrowness, its prejudices, its oddities, its combative energy, and rugged, unconquerable strength, is among the things of the past, or lingers in remote corners where the whistle of the locomotive is never heard.  It has spread itself in swarming millions over half a continent, changing with changing conditions; and even the part of it that clings to the ancestral hive has transformed and continues to transform itself.