he finds himself surrounded by a convulsed and a half dissolved one?  He cannot live in solitude, he must belong to some community bound by some ties, however imperfect.  Men mutually support and add to the boldness and confidence of each other; the weakness of each is strengthened by the force of the whole.  I had never before these calamitous times formed any such ideas; I lived on, laboured and prospered, without having ever studied on what the security of my life and the foundation of my prosperity were established:  I perceived them just as they left me.  Never was a situation so singularly terrible as mine, in every possible respect, as a member of an extensive society, as a citizen of an inferior division of the same society, as a husband, as a father, as a man who exquisitely feels for the miseries of others as well as for his own!  But alas! so much is everything now subverted among us, that the very word misery, with which we were hardly acquainted before, no longer conveys the same ideas; or rather tired with feeling for the miseries of others, every one feels now for himself alone.  When I consider myself as connected in all these characters, as bound by so many cords, all uniting in my heart, I am seized with a fever of the mind, I am transported beyond that degree of calmness which is necessary to delineate our thoughts.  I feel as if my reason wanted to leave me, as if it would burst its poor weak tenement:  again I try to compose myself, I grow cool, and preconceiving the dreadful loss, I endeavour to retain the useful guest.

You know the position of our settlement; I need not therefore describe it.  To the west it is inclosed by a chain of mountains, reaching to——­; to the east, the country is as yet but thinly inhabited; we are almost insulated, and the houses are at a considerable distance from each other.  From the mountains we have but too much reason to expect our dreadful enemy; the wilderness is a harbour where it is impossible to find them.  It is a door through which they can enter our country whenever they please; and, as they seem determined to destroy the whole chain of frontiers, our fate cannot be far distant:  from Lake Champlain, almost all has been conflagrated one after another.  What renders these incursions still more terrible is, that they most commonly take place in the dead of the night; we never go to our fields but we are seized with an involuntary fear, which lessens our strength and weakens our labour.  No other subject of conversation intervenes between the different accounts, which spread through the country, of successive acts of devastation; and these told in chimney-corners, swell themselves in our affrighted imaginations into the most terrific ideas!  We never sit down either to dinner or supper, but the least noise immediately spreads a general alarm and prevents us from enjoying the comfort of our meals.  The very appetite proceeding from labour and peace of mind is gone; we eat just enough to keep us alive: