One of Whittier’s early poems speaks of an Indian re-visiting the stream that his forefathers loved, and standing on Powow Hill, where the chiefs of the Naumkeaks, and of the other tribes held their powows.  Here for a moment, says the poem, a gleam of gladness came to him as he stooped to drink of the fountain and seated himself under an oak.

  “Far behind was Ocean striving
    With his chains of sand;
  Southward, sunny glimpses giving
    ’Twixt the swells of land,
  Of its calm and silvery track
  Rolled the tranquil Merrimack.”

The Indian’s feeling about “These bare hills, this conquered river,” was not strange.  But to us it naturally occurs that we are more likely to wake up with our scalps on our heads, instead of sleeping our last sleep, while they dangle at a red man’s girdle.  Yet the very state of warfare that at that time existed between the races showed that in the settlers themselves was an element of savagery not yet eliminated.  For in all this fierce strife of the tomahawk and the gun, the Quaker ancestors of the poet Whittier who met the Indians, armed only with kindness and the high courage of their peaceful convictions, were treated by the red men as friends and superiors.  In the raids of general devastation they were unmolested.  Their descendant has a natural right to express the pathos of the Indian’s lot.

There is a fine exhibition of human nature in the records of the first settlement of Amesbury.  The place was called “Salisbury new-town” until 1669, and was merely an offshoot of the latter, though much larger in extent than it is today, for now it is only about six miles by three.  Then it reached up into what is now Newton, N.H.  But why should not the people of those days have been generous as to the size of townships, for as to land, they had the continent before them where to choose?

But in regard to the human nature.  The settlers of Salisbury went at first only beyond the salt marshes, their town being what is now East Salisbury.  The forests beyond had a threatening look, and were much too near.  It was determined, therefore, to drive them back by having clearings and settlements across the Powow.  So, December 26, 1642, about three years after this little colony had crossed the Merrimack, a town meeting was held in which it was voted:—­“Yere shall thirtie families remove to the west side of ye Powowas river.”  This motion was very easy to carry.  But it had not been voted what families were to move on beyond the immediate protection of the small colony at East Salisbury.  Who was to go?  Every man sat still in his place and nodded to his neighbor with a “Thou art the man,” in manner if not in words.  It seems to us a very little thing to give or take the advice, “Go West young man,—­or woman.”  But it was very different then.  To do it meant, besides living encircled by forests, to be obliged to go on Sunday through these forests, worse than lonely, to the meeting-house at East Salisbury,