Red part of plunder, 9 small
tooth combs." Crafts died in the spring, of the prevailing distemper, after
doing good service in the commissary department of his regiment.
Stephen Williams, the preacher whose sermons had comforted Crafts in his
trouble, was a son of Rev. John Williams, captured by the Indians at
Deerfield in 1704, and was now minister of Long Meadow, Massachusetts. He
had joined the anti-papal crusade as one of its chaplains, and passed for a
man of ability,--a point on which those who read his diary will probably
have doubts. The lot of the army chaplains was of the hardest. A pestilence
had fallen upon Louisbourg, and turned the fortress into a hospital. "After
we got into the town," says the sarcastic Dr. Douglas, whose pleasure it is
to put everything in its worst light, "a sordid indolence or sloth, for
want of discipline, induced putrid fevers and dysenteries, which at length
in August became contagious, and the people died like rotten sheep." From
fourteen to twenty-seven were buried every day in the cemetery behind the
town, outside the Maurepas Gate, by the old lime-kiln, on Rochefort Point;
and the forgotten bones of above five hundred New England men lie there to
this day under the coarse, neglected grass.
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