The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish | Page 4

the forlorn-hope, in the march of
civilization through the country.
So little was then known of the great outlines of the American
continent, that, when the Lords Say and Seal, and Brooke, connected
with a few associates, obtained a grant of the territory which now

composes the state of Connecticut, the King of England affixed his
name to a patent, which constituted them proprietors of a country that
should extend from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the South Sea.
Notwithstanding the apparent hopelessness of ever subduing, or of even
occupying a territory like this, emigrants from the mother colony of
Massachusetts were found ready to commence the Herculean labor,
within fifteen years from the day when they had first put foot upon the
well-known rock itself. The fort of Say-Brooke, the towns of Windsor,
Hartford, and New-Haven, soon sprang into existence, and, from that
period to this, the little community, which then had birth, has been
steadily, calmly, and prosperously advancing its career, a model of
order and reason, and the hive from which swarms of industrious, hardy
and enlightened yeomen have since spread themselves over a surface so
vast, as to create an impression that they still aspire to the possession of
the immense regions included in their original grant.
Among the religionists, whom disgust of persecution had early driven
into the voluntary exile of the colonies, was more than an usual
proportion of men of character and education. The reckless and the gay,
younger sons, soldiers unemployed, and students from the inns of court,
early sought advancement and adventure in the more southern
provinces, where slaves offered impunity from labor, and where war,
with a bolder and more stirring policy, oftener gave rise to scenes of
excitement, and, of course, to the exercise of the faculties best suited to
their habits and dispositions. The more grave, and the
religiously-disposed, found refuge in the colonies of New-England.
Thither a multitude of private gentlemen transferred their fortunes and
their families, imparting a character of intelligence and a moral
elevation to the country, which it has nobly sustained to the present
hour.
The nature of the civil wars in England had enlisted many men of deep
and sincere piety in the profession of arms. Some of them had retired to
the colonies before the troubles of the mother country reached their
crisis, and others continued to arrive, throughout the whole period of
their existence, until the restoration; when crowds of those who had
been disaffected to the house of Stuart sought the security of these
distant possessions.
A stern, fanatical soldier, of the name of Heathcote, had been among

the first of his class, to throw aside the sword for the implements of
industry peculiar to the advancement of a newly-established country.
How far the influence of a young wife may have affected his decision it
is not germane to our present object to consider, though the records,
from which the matter we are about to relate is gleaned, give reason to
suspect that he thought his domestic harmony would not be less secure
in the wilds of the new world, than among the companions with whom
his earlier associations would naturally have brought him in
communion.
Like himself, his consort was born of one of those families, which,
taking their rise in the franklins of the times of the Edwards and Henrys,
had become possessors of hereditary landed estates, that, by their
gradually-increasing value, had elevated them to the station of small
country gentlemen. In most other nations of Europe, they would have
been rated in the class of the petite noblesse. But the domestic
happiness of Capt. Heathcote was doomed to receive a fatal blow, from
a quarter where circumstances had given him but little reason to
apprehend danger. The very day he landed in the long-wished-for
asylum, his wife made him the father of a noble boy, a gift that she
bestowed at the melancholy price of her own existence. Twenty years
the senior of the woman who had followed his fortunes to these distant
regions, the retired warrior had always considered it to be perfectly and
absolutely within the order of things, that he himself was to be the first
to pay the debt of nature. While the visions which Captain Heathcote
entertained of a future world were sufficiently vivid and distinct, there
is reason to think they were seen through a tolerably long vista of quiet
and comfortable enjoyment in this. Though the calamity cast an
additional aspect of seriousness over a character that was already more
than chastened by the subtleties of sectarian doctrines, he was not of a
nature to be unmanned by any vicissitude of human fortune. He lived
on, useful and unbending in his habits, a pillar of strength in the