Summary

In Chapter 1, a young couple flees their colony for the woods. Although alone, the couple rejoices in their freedom. They fled “Plymouth, fled New Haven, to settle in a hut on Springfield’s edge” (6). The young woman ran away with her lover to avoid marrying “a minister of twice her age” (6). They found their new home in the woods seven days into their flight.

In “Anonymous, The ‘Nightmaids’ Letter,” a young, unnamed girl was awake with her baby when a group of Natives stormed the house and killed her “kin and neighbors” (11). She fled with the baby. After running for days, she found “a hut of log and stone” in the north woods (13). Here, she met an elderly woman who “had fled the Colony with her husband many years ago” (14). After her husband died, she had married “a Praying Indian” who had since...