made oath to the above s'd will,

JONATHAN REMINGTON, _Cleric_."

But John Prescott's pilgrimage was far from ended, and severer
chastenings than any yet experienced awaited him. He had survived to see
the settlement that called him father, struggle upward from discouraging
beginnings, to become a thriving and happy community of over fifty
families. Where at his coming all had been pathless woods, now fenced
fields and orchards yielded annually their golden and ruddy harvests;
gardens bloomed; mechanic's plied their various crafts; herds wandered
in lush meadows; bridges spanned the rivers, and roads wound through the
landscape from cottage to cottage and away to neighboring towns. All
this fair scene of industry and rural content, of which he might in
modest truth say "_Magna pars fui_," he lived to see in a single day
made more desolate than the howling wilderness from which it had been
laboriously conquered. He was spared to see dear neighbors and kindred
massacred in every method of revolting atrocity, and their wives and
children carried into loathsome captivity by foes more relentlessly
cruel than wolves. When now weighed down with age and bodily
infirmities, the rest he had thought won was to be denied him, and he
and his were driven from the ashes of pleasant homes--about which
clustered the memories of thirty years' joys and sorrows--to beg shelter
from the charity of strangers. For more than three years his enforced
banishment endured. In October 1679, John Prescott with his sons John
and Jonathan, his sons-in-law Thomas Sawyer and John Rugg, his grand-son
Thomas Sawyer, Jr. and his neighbor's John Moore, Thomas Wilder, and
Josiah White, petitioned the Middlesex Court for permission to resettle
the town, and their prayer was granted. Soon most of the inhabitants who
had survived the massacre and exile, were busily building new homes,