We have said that he secured enough land—despite of the entries made after and upon his—to render him independent for life; but there were not wanting those, in his latter days, base enough to defraud the confiding and noble old hero out of the remainder of his affluence. In 1828 Congress granted him a pension, dating back many years, which afforded him an ample support the remainder of his life.
The records of such lives as his should be carefully preserved, that the luxurious and effeminate young men of to-day, and those of the future, may know by what courage and hardships their ease has been secured to them.
Suddenly, through the clear stillness of an autumn morning rung out the three rapid reports of an alarm-gun, which had been agreed upon by the three frontier forts defending the valley of the Schoharie, as a signal of danger. The faint flush in the eastern sky was as yet not strong enough to tinge the white frost glittering over leaf and grass; the deep repose of earliest dawn rested over all things in that beautiful vale; but as the thunder of that alarm-gun rolled sullenly along the air, every eye unclosed, every heart awoke from the even pulse of sleep to the hurried beat of fear and excitement.
Not even the inhabitants of Gettysburg, nor the plundered, misused people of East Tennessee, can imagine the appalling terrors which beset our ancestors during those "days which tried men's souls," when they fought for the liberties which now we are bound to defend in all their sanctity against foes at home or abroad. When we recall the price paid for our present position in the van of progress and free government, well may our hearts burn with inextinguishable resolve never to give up what was so nobly purchased.
Pardon the reflection, which has nothing to do with the story we have to tell of TIMOTHY MURPHY, THE CELEBRATED RIFLEMAN OF MORGAN'S CORPS. Only this we _must_ say: our English neighbors, who are so much shocked at the way we have managed our civil war, ought to turn back to that disgraceful page of their history whereon is written the hideous record of Indian barbarities which they employed against us—_against our women and children, our firesides, our innocent babes_!