Page:Scenes in my Native Land.pdf/72

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68
TRADITIONS.

purpled with the blood of the beautiful babes of Jeanson; the frantic wife and mother snatched from the scene of slaughter by her brother, and borne through the waters of French River, to the garrison at Woodstock; all these traces seemed as vivid in her mind as if her eyes had witnessed them. The tradititions connected with the massacre, were doubtless more strongly deepened in her memory, from the circumstance that the champion who rescued his desolated sister from the merciless barbarians, was her own ancestor, Mr. Andrew Sigourney, and the original settler of Oxford.

Other narrations she had also preserved, of troubles that preceded the flight of the exiles from France, and of the obstacles to be surmounted, ere that flight could be accomplished. The interruptions from the soldiery to which they were subject, after having been shut out from their own churches, induced them to meet for divine worship in the most remote places, and to use books of psalms and devotion, printed in so minute a form, that they might concealed in their bosoms, or in the folds of their head-dresses. One of these antique volumes, is still in the possession of the descendants of Gabriel Bernon, a most excellent and influential man, who made his permanent residence at Providence, though he was originally in the settlement at Oxford.

Mrs. Butler mentioned the haste and discomfort in which the flight of their own family was made. Her