Violence With Us

History of the Indian Wars  by Samuel Penhallow is an amazing book; it is stark in its narrative, difficult to read, and is an account of the bloody and tragic relationship between the adventurous and aggressive colonists and the resistive Indians during the period from 1703 to the ratified peace treaties of 1723.

I read it aloud to my beloved either last winter or the winter before.  This was not our first experience with this typography. I had learned about it in a course called The History of the Written Word. HWMBO found it in Wisconsin history ledgers and church documents when he was researching his Norwegian immigrant Great Grandmother and her family.  If you click the underlined link above to see an example of pages 36 and 37 you will see how confusing it can be, not just to read silently, but to read aloud.  It took a while before I could sort out the 's' that looked like 'f'' and the odd capitalized words in the middle of a sentence.

"On the 8th of July, five Indians a little before Night, fell on an Out-houfe in Reading, where they furpriz'd a Woman with eight Children; the former with the three youngeft were inftantly difpatcht, and the other they carried Captive; but one of the Children unable to travel, they knockt on the head, and left in the Swamp, concluding it was dead, but a while after it was found alive."

To find out how the story comes out click on the above link.  I believe the entire book is available to read online. It is helpful to enlarge it with the + icon on the lower right.

Wonders of the Internet, wonders of online access to so many books.  Yes, Amazon provides Kindle on your PC no charge, at least they did a while back.  As much as I love the feel and smell of a book in my hands, some better than others of course, depending on the binding I suppose, still one cannot beat the availability of  information online.  Thanks to Project Gutenburg, Google, Amazon Kindle for PC (Free), LibriVox,

LibriVox

The subtitle to LibriVox is "acoustical liberation of books in the public domain."  What a treasure trove for me.  I suppose the laptop might be a little awkward to drag around the house as I find  a blanket, a pillow, and a cozy corner to listen to a story; or read one myself.  Almost as good as Kindle, but one will not find the newly published titles here.

What a nifty perk on the Internet, just for the taking, free audiobooks. This evening I browsed around and found a some random samples.  If you haven't heard a child's voice lately, "Twas the Night Before Christmas" read by a father and a child is charming.