and in another respect much more safe, as it lay more contiguous to the sea. The greater portion of the country immediately endangered from the Yemassees had been duly warned, and none but the slow, the indifferent, and the obstinate but had taken sufficient heed of the many warnings given them and put themselves in safety. Numbers, however, coming under one or other of these classes had fallen victims to their folly or temerity in the sudden onslaught which followed the first movement of the savages among them, who, scattering themselves over the country, had made their attack so nearly at the same time as to defeat anything like unity of action in the resistance which might have been offered them.
Grayson's first care in his new command was to get the women and children fairly out of the way. The close upper apartment of the Block House had been especially assigned them, and there they had assembled generally. But some few of the old ladies were not to be shut up, and his own good Puritan mother gave the busy commandant no little trouble. She went to and fro, interfering in this, preventing that, and altogether annoying the men to such a degree that it became absolutely necessary to put on a show of sternness which, in a moment of less real danger and anxiety, would have been studiously forborne. With some difficulty, and the assistance of Granger's wife, he at length got her out of the way, and, to the great satisfaction of all parties, she worried herself to sleep in the midst of a Psalm, which she crooned over to the dreariest tune in her whole collection. Sleep had also fortunately seized upon the children generally; and but few in the room assigned to the women were able to withstand the approaches of that subtle magician. The wife of the trader, almost alone, continued watchful—thoughtful in emergency, and with a ready degree of common sense to contend with trial and to prepare against it. The confused cluster of sleeping forms, in all positions and of
