Even to this day they never hear a thunderstorm of a summer afternoon about the Kaatskill, but they say Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at their game of nine-pins;

Having nothing to do at home, and being arrived at that happy age when a man can be idle with impunity,

but it’s twenty years since he went away from home

why, he is dead and gone these eighteen years!

He called loudly for his wife and children—the lonely chambers rang for a moment with his voice, and then all again was silence.

Wolf, too, had disappeared,

As Rip and his companion approached them, they suddenly desisted from their play, and stared at him with such fixed, statue-like gaze,

a crow winging its solitary flight across the mountain

unlucky Rip was at length routed by his vtermagant wife,

who was not to be daunted by the most gigantic word in the dictionary!

He shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, cast up his eyes, but said nothing.

and that there was seemingly no viable reason for it other than inherent brutality.

The problem is not that Mary Rowlandson wrote about her captivity. The problem, rather, is that she—and society as a whole—deemed the context of her captivity unimportant.

One hour I have been in health, and wealthy, wanting nothing. But the next hour in sickness and wounds, and death, having nothing but sorrow and affliction.

others shaking me by the hand, offering me a hood and scarfe to ride in; not one moving hand or tongue against it.

They mourned (with their black faces) for their own losses, yet triumphed and rejoiced in their inhumane, and many times devilish cruelty to the English

They would pick up old bones, and cut them to pieces at the joints, and if they were full of worms and maggots, they would scald them over the fire to make the vermine come out, and then boil them, and drink up the liquor, and then beat the great ends of them in a mortar, and so eat them. They would eat horse’s guts, and ears, and all sorts of wild birds which they could catch; also bear, venison, beaver, tortoise, frogs, squirrels, dogs, skunks, rattlesnakes; yea, the very bark of trees;

I told them, they had as good knock me in head as starve me to death.

Then I took it of the child, and eat it myself, and savory it was to my taste.

“I shall die, I shall die.

Englishmen’s scalps

When I came in sight, she would fall aweeping; at which they were provoked, and would not let me come near her, but bade me be gone

hen they went and showed me where it was, where I saw the ground was newly digged, and there they told me they had buried it.

There they blend their songs together, brother-wise;

By the sun see the dancing white men with the red— By Wounded Knee, a post!

Have I lost too the courage of the black bear

One half the feather of Tiráwa's bird is white; The other black—’tis night; Tiráwa's song at night is morning star of dawn