walls. "His is that consuming fire; his breath is the bellows which blows up the flame of hell forever; he is the damning fire - the everlasting burning; and if he punish thee, if he meet thee in his fury, he will not meet thee as a man, he will give thee an omnipotent blow." Whether Mr. Treat dealt out such red-hot doctrine to his Indians, we cannot know; perhaps they were warmed by the fervor rather than alarmed by the tenor of his words. At any rate, they loved him; and when he died during the Great Snow of 1716, they tunnelled a way to the grave and bore him to his rest.

There were old ordinances forbidding the whites to give or sell firearms, ammunition, canoes, or horses to Indians. There was also a provision that "whoever shall shoot off a gun on any unnecessary occasion, or at any game except at an Indian, or a wolf, shall forfeit five shillings for every shot." Evidently all was not love and trust between the races. The Indians steadily dwindled in numbers until at Eastham in 1763 there were but five Indians, and at Truro in 1792 only one family, although an old lady then remembered that there used to be as many Indian children at school as whites, and "sometimes the little Injuns tried to crow over 'em." Early in the nineteenth century the pure-breed Mashpees were extinct; but in 1830 William Apes, an "Indian" preacher, succeeded in enlarging their religious liberties; in 1842 their common lands were apportioned in sixty-acre lots; in 1870 Mashpee became a town with full self-government, though still with some special grants of state aid for schools and highways.

"Rum" here, as elsewhere, played its important part in undermining the stamina of the natives; and its evil, as in any age, exhorters to virtue were prone only too vividly to depict. "Mr. Stone one very good preacher," commented a Mashpee, "but he preach too much about rum. When he no preach about rum, Injun think nothing 'bout it; but when he tells how Injun love rum, and how much they drunk, then I think how good rum is and think no more 'bout sermon, my mouth waters so much for rum." And when asked whether he preferred Mr. Stone or "Blind Joe,' a Baptist, he said: "Mr. Stone he make best sermons, but Blind Joe he make best Christians." And as in other and later times the whites made their profit in selling drink to the Indians. As early as 1685 Governor Hinckley writes of the Indians: "They have their courts and judges; but a great obstruction to bringing them to more civility and Christianity is the great appetite of the young generation for strong liquors, and the covetous ill-humor of sundry of our English in furnishing them therewith notwithstanding all the court orders and means used to prohibit the same.

The Indians were inveterate gamblers, and although they could sit solemnly enough through a church service, they were as likely to go forth to game away all they had even to their precious knives and kettles. And the whites, as in the early days before they had made good Christians of the "salvages,' were ready to suspect them of petty thievery: for which, however, the savages were not without ex

amples to imitate. An Indian, reproved for taking a knife from an Englishman's house, retorted: "Barlow steals from the Quakers. Why can't I steal?" At Yarmouth, late in the seventeen hundreds, near the mouth of Bass River, was a little cluster of wigwams; and whether for reason or not, an irate deacon, suspecting some of the community of robbing his henroost, visited them in the early morning, only to be abashed by finding them at prayer. He stole away without further inquiry about his hens. And the Indian deacon, one Naughaught, nettled, perhaps, by such suspicions, upon finding a purse of money one day, would not open it save in the presence of witnesses at the tavern. "If I were to do so," he told them, "all the trees of the forest would see and testify against me." And this same Naughaught had a marvellous adventure that must have made a fine story for drinkers at the tavern. Walking one day far from the habitations of man, went the tale, he was set upon by a great number of black snakes a common and harmless reptile in the Cape Cod meadows to-day, but going about their business there in smaller companies. Unarmed, Naughaught saw that his defence lay only in a steadfast spirit. He quailed not when the snakes writhed up his body, even to the neck; and when one, bolder than the rest, faced him eye to eye, he opened his mouth and straight snapped off its head. Whereupon its companions withdrew and left Naughaught master of the field.

It is matter of record that the Cape Indians were more friendly to the whites, more humane, and more

easily converted to Christianity than their brothers of the mainland, and in like measure were the more despised by them. "The Praying Indians were subjects," said Philip, son of the great Massasoit, when there was question of taking the oath of fidelity to the English sovereign. But not he or his fellows; his kinsmen had ever been friendly with the Plymouth Government: his father and brother had made engagement to that end, but it was only for amity, not subjection. And by 1662 Philip was ready to defy Plymouth. "Your government is only a subject of King Charles II of England," he told them. "I shall treat only with the king, my brother. When Charles of England comes, I am ready."

As early as 1642 rumored unrest among the Indians and a well-grounded fear that the mother country might draw the Plantations into her quarrels with the Dutch or French, had knit the colonies closer together, and in 1643 a protective league that was the prototype of the later confederacy of states was formed among the New England colonies. Two commissioners from each colony, six of the eight to make a majority rule, were to meet annually in September; a common war chest and a colonial militia were provided for; but none were to fight unless compelled to do so, or only upon the consent of all. The Plymouth quota, under command of Miles Standish, was to be thirty men, of whom the Cape should furnish eight.

In 1675 trouble with the Indians came to a head in King Philip's War, in which the Cape, although criticised by Plymouth, bore her due share. It was charged

of Sandwich that "many of the soldiers who were pressed came not forth." As a fact, Sandwich, the frontier town of the Cape, was well occupied in seeing to her own defences that must separate the Praying Indians from the hostile natives of the mainland; nor was the town of Richard Bourne, with its large Quaker element, likely to be as eager to fight the Indians as Plymouth or Massachusetts. The Cape Indians were restive enough to cause apprehension, and the towns were constantly on watch for attack without and treachery within. Restriction upon the Indians was tightened, account of them was kept the easier by providing that "every tenth Indian should have particular oversight over his nine men and present their faults to the authorities." The five or six hundred men capable of bearing arms could have made trouble enough for the whites if they had had the will; but whether for gratitude or lack of spirit, they were loyal — some even joined the troops. Mr. Walley, who was ever friendly to the Indians and ready to give them their due, observed that so well did they fight that "throughout the land where Indians hath been employed there hath been the greatest success," and pondered how affairs might go without their aid. “I am greatly afflicted to see the danger we are in," he wrote Mr. Cotton, of Plymouth. "Some fear we have paid dearly for former acts of severity." Nor were there lacking heavenly portents of disaster: in 1664 a great comet had appeared, and three years later, "about an hour within the night," another "like a spear," and again another in 1680. "When