On the thirty-first day of March, one hundred and forty-two years before this, probably about this time in the afternoon, there we...re hurriedly paddling down this part of the river, between the pine woods which then fringed these banks, two white women and a boy, who had left an island at the mouth of the Contoocook before daybreak. They were lightly clad for the season, in the English fashion, and handled their paddles unskillfully, but with nervous energy and determination, and at the bottom of their canoe lay the still bleeding scalps of ten of the aborigines. They were Hannah Dustan, and her nurse, Mary Neff,... and an English boy, named Samuel Lennardson, escaping from captivity among the Indians. On the 15th of March previous, Hannah Dustan had been compelled to rise from childbed, and half dressed, with one foot bare, accompanied by her nurse, commence an uncertain march, in still inclement weather, through the snow and the wilderness. She had seen her seven elder children flee with their father, but knew not of their fate. She had seen her infant's brains dashed out against an apple tree, and had left her own and her neighbors' dwellings in ashes. When she reached the wigwam of her captor, situated on an island in the Merrimack, more than twenty miles above where we now are, she had been told that she and her nurse were soon to be taken to a distant Indian settlement, and there made to run the gauntlet naked.... Having determined to attempt her escape, she instructed the boy to inquire of one of the men, how he should dispatch an enemy in the quickest manner, and take his scalp. "Strike 'em there," said he, placing his finger on his temple, and he also showed him how to take off the scalp. On the morning of the 31st she arose before daybreak, and awoke her nurse and the boy, and taking the Indians' tomahawks, they killed them all in their sleep, excepting one favorite boy, and one squaw who fled wounded with him to the woods. The English boy struck the Indian who had given him the information, on the temple, as he had been directed. They then collected all the provision they could find, and took their master's tomahawk and gun, and scuttling all the canoes but one, commenced their flight to Haverhill, distant about sixty miles by the river. But after having proceeded a short distance, fearing that her story would not be believed if she should escape to tell it, they returned to the silent wigwam, and taking off the scalps of the dead, put them into a bag as proofs of what they had done, and then, retracing their steps to the shore in the twilight, recommenced their voyage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Determination and skill come out of a depth of political and cultural experiences. Women resist and are brave in the most ordinary...-seeming situations: on a welfare line, after being told that medical benefits are going to cut; on a street late at night helping a sister who is being harassed; as a mother demanding that the hospital stop experimenting with sterilization on her daughters; one sister to another trying to convince her to stop shooting up because it's giving the man a victory, swallowing up her life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those great ideas which come to you in your sleep just before you awake in morning, those solutions to the world's problems which,... in the light of day, turn out to be duds of the puniest order, couldn't they be put to some use, after all?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The King [Charles II] after the Restoration accused the poet, Edmund Waller, of having made finer verses in praise of Oliver Cromw...ell than of himself; to which he agreed, saying, that Fiction was the soul of Poetry.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here stands the row of enormous stelæ that have furnished the date that links the Mayan calendar to ours. These stones standing g...rimly in line, swelling with the enormous strength of their halfobliterated carvings, still give you, through all the confusion of races and empires long dead, of languages and writings that can never be understood, a feeling of serene order and form... so that after seeing them, the railroad and the guns and the overseers and the loading sheds and the uptodate malaria hospital, all the carefully organized machinery for efficiently squeezing...the sweat and blood of the yellow brown and white mongrel race of workers who live in the rows of company shacks...seems feeble and flabby, not organization at all, not order at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Steve, all those things that happened to us, everything that went before, we'll forget it. You'll see. I'll make you forget it. Af...ter it's done, after it's all over and we're safe, it'll be just you and me. You and me. The way it should've been all along from the start.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it... has passed away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »