CHAPTER IV. 



1700-1755. 

 COLLISION OF THE EIVAL COLONIES. 



The people of the northern English colonies had 

 learned to regard their Canadian neighbors with 

 the bitterest enmity. With them, the very name 

 of Canada called up horrible recollections and 

 ghastly images : the midnight massacre of Schen- 

 ectady, and the desolation of many a New Eng- 

 land hamlet ; blazing dwellings and reeking scalps ; 

 and children snatched from their mothers' arms, to 

 be immured in convents and trained up in the 

 abominations of Popery. To the sons of the Puri- 

 tans, their enemy was doubly odious. They hated 

 him as a Frenchman, and they hated him as a 

 Papist. Hitherto he had waged his ' murderous 

 warfare from a distance, wasting their settlements 

 with rapid onsets, fierce and ti'ansient as a summer 

 storm ; but now, with enterprising audacity, he was 

 intrenching himself on their very borders. The 

 English hunter, in the lonely wilderness of Ver- 

 mont, as by the warm glow of sunset he piled the* 

 spruce boughs for his woodland bed, started as a 

 deep, low sound struck faintly on his ear, the even- 

 ing gun ot Fort Frederic, booming over lake and 



