The difference between this feeling and that which I had toward the Frenchmen, who fought us with the Indians, and who helped the savages scalp us, was that the French were poor fellows who did not know any better; and besides, the French had helped us in the Revolution against the British, so that we would forgive them, but the Britishers, never!
As time wore on, I was literally adopted by my grandmother, my grandfather having died several years before. She was a very remarkable looking woman, who stood about five feet eleven inches in her stockings. She was then in the neighborhood of eighty years old, and walked with a stick, yet she was as erect as ever, and was the most imperious person I have ever seen, to everybody but me. She had a most inflexible will, apparently never yielding to others, and subjecting all others to herself. She read to me, but inasmuch as she read as she had been taught in her youth, it was almost unintelligible, and this caused some difficulties between us. For example, she always pronounced w-o-u-l-d as if it were spelled w-o-o-l-d, and s-h-o-u-l-d as if spelled s-h-o-o-l-d, and she taught me that the name of the sign of conjunction (&) at the end of the alphabet was ampersand, a word which I learned afterwards, from an old spelling book of her generation, was really “and per se.” She told me the history of battles as they were known and seen by her, the daughter of a general and the mother of a captain in the first and second wars with England, and all the pathetic incidents of the wars, like the capture and death of Jane McRea, who was surrendered to the French, and scalped by their Indian allies, in the northern part of New York.
She also told me, boy as I was, of the injustice of the men toward the women, and toward their own younger brothers, in assuming to enforce the law of primogeniture, and how, when they failed to pass it in the constitutional convention of New Hampshire, the men made
