The night before his death, Philip, “like him in the army of Midian,”
says the historian, “had been dreaming that he was fallen into the
hands of the English; he awoke in great alarm, and told it to his
friends, and advised them to fly for their lives, for that he believed
it would come to pass.” The place was well suited to awake all the
terrors of the imagination; to any eye but that of the savage, it was
like the “valley of the shadow of death;” the cypress and oak trees
hung heavy and still, over the accursed soil; the faint gleam of the
pools and sluggish lakes on every side, in the starlight, and the howl
of the wolf, fitfully, as if it warned that the hour was nigh. “Now,
just as he was telling his dream, Captain Church, with his company,
fell in upon them.” They had been guided by the deserter to the
swamp, and, with great difficulty, across some felled trees, into its
labyrinths. The battle was fierce and short: Philip fought till he saw
almost every follower fall in his defence, then turned, and fled; he
was pursued by an Englishman and an Indian; and, as if the oracle was
doomed to be fulfilled, the musket of the former would not go off; and
the latter fired, and shot him through the heart.
With his death, all resistance ceased; his dominions fell into the
hands of the colonists, and peace was restored to the settlements,
but prosperity came not with it. It was a cruel blow to Eliot, nearly
all whose life had been given his beloved cause, to look around on the
plantations ravaged, the dwellings empty, the defences broken, and,
more than all, the spirit of his people in despair. Of twelve towns, at
the beginning of the war, four only were now undestroyed.