Page:Archæologia Americana—volume 2, 1836.djvu/539

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the Christian Indians.
503

friends and his children, he treated them civilly, and forthwith sent them with a guard back to Marlborough, to be conveyed to Boston. But when the poor creatures came to Marlborough, they being quartered there one night or two by the constable’s order, until an opportunity served to send them on to Boston, there came some people of the town (especially women) to their quarter, some of whom did so abuse, threaten, and taunt at these poor Christians, and they being thereby put into great fears, that in the night the minister’s[1] wife, and his eldest son, a lad of twelve years old, and another woman, a widow that had carefully kept and nourished Job’s children, with her daughter, being four of them in all, escaped away into the woods; the minister’s wife left a nursing infant behind her, with her husband, of about three months old, which affliction was a very sore trial to the poor man, his wife and eldest son gone, and the poor infant no breast to nourish it. I heard a prudent gentleman, one Capt. Brattle of Boston, who was then at Marlborough, (for he heard the people's taunts and threats to them,) say, that he was ashamed to see and hear what he did of that kind, and, if he had been an Indian and so abused, he should have run away as they did. Not long after, this poor minister, Joseph Tuckappawillin, and his aged father, Naaos, a man of about eighty years old, both good Christians, with three or four children of the minister's, and Job's three children, were all sent to Boston, where they were kept a night or two, and then sent to Deer Island, where God provided a nurse (among the Indians) to preserve the life of the sucking infant; and about two months after, his wife was recovered and brought in by Tom Dublet,[2] one of our messengers to the enemy; but his eldest son before mentioned died, after he went away from Marlborough with his mother, conceived to lose his life by famine. The other widow, who went away at that time, and her daughter, were also recovered. This widow Job married afterward, not knowing how better to requite her love showed in nourishing and preferring his three children when they were among the enemies, and they now lived comfortably together; so that after all the troubles, sorrows, and calamities this man Job underwent, (as we have before touched,) God gave him all his children in safety,

  1. Tuckapawillin.
  2. He was very successful in negotiating with the Nipmuks. In The Book of the Indians is given his biography, under the name of Nepanet.