Here again he hired himself out for three months; at the end of that time to receive for his wages two hundred acres of land lying in New Hampshire.

The cheapness of the land was not alone owing to the newness of the country, but to the perils investing it.

Not only was it a wilderness abounding with wild beasts, but the widely-scattered inhabitants were in continual dread of being, at some unguarded moment, destroyed or made captive by the Canadian savages, who, ever since the French war, had improved every opportunity to make forays across the defenceless frontier.
His employer proving false to his contract in the matter of the land, and there being no law in the country to force him to fulfil it, Israel--who, however brave-hearted, and even much of a dare-devil upon a pinch, seems nevertheless to have evinced, throughout many parts of his career, a singular patience and mildness--was obliged to look round for other means of livelihood than clearing out a farm for himself in the wilderness.

A party of royal surveyors were at this period surveying the unsettled regions bordering the Connecticut river to its source.

At fifteen shillings per month, he engaged himself to this party as assistant chain-bearer, little thinking that the day was to come when he should clank the king's chains in a dungeon, even as now he trailed them a free ranger of the woods.