1764, Nov.] SCENES AT THE ENGLISH CAMP. 231 



army, in tlie feverish hope of winning them back 

 to home and civihzation. Perhaps those whom 

 they sought had perished by the slow torments of 

 the stake ; perhaps by the more merciful hatchet ; 

 or perhaps they still dragged out a wretched life 

 in the midst of a savage horde. There were in- 

 stances in which whole families had been carried 

 off at once. The old, the sick, or the despairing, 

 had been tomahawked, as useless encumbrances ; 

 while the rest, pitilessly forced asunder, were scat- 

 tered through every quarter of the wilderness. It 

 was a strange and moving sight, when troop after 

 troop of prisoners arrived in succession — the 

 meeting of husbands with wives, and fathers with 

 children, the reunion of broken families, long sepa- 

 rated in a disastrous captivity ; and, on the other 

 hand, the agonies of those who learned tidings of 

 death and horror, or groaned under the torture of 

 protracted suspense. Women, frantic between hope 

 and fear, were rushing hither and thither, in search 

 of those whose tender limbs had, perhaps, long 

 since fattened the cubs of the she-wolf ; or were 

 pausing, in an agony of doubt, before some sun- 

 burnt young savage, who, startled at the haggard 

 apparition, shrank from his forgotten parent, and 

 clung to the tawny breast of his adopted mother. 

 Others were divided between delight and anguish : 

 on the one hand, the joy of an unexpected recog- 

 nition ; and, on the other, the misery of realized 

 fears, or the more intolerable pangs of doubts not 

 yet resolved. Of all the spectators of this tragic 

 drama, few were obdurate enough to stand un- 



