"Speak! speak! thou fearful guest! Who, with thy hollow breast Still in rude armor drest, Comest to daunt me!
"Wrapt not in Eastern balms, But with thy fleshless palms Stretched, as if asking alms, Why dost thou haunt me?"
"I was a Viking old! My deeds, though manifold, No Skald in song has told, No Saga taught thee!
"Take heed, that in thy verse, Thou dost the tale rehearse, Else dread a dead man's curse; For this I sought thee."
And then the poet unfolds his weird and romantic history. Despite the Norsemen traditions, however, it is regarded as more probable that both the hieroglyphics and the skeleton were of Indian origin.
Upon the western shore of Mount Hope Bay is the town of Bristol, quiet, with wide, grassy, tree-shaded streets leading down to the waterside, now a pleasant summer-resort, having a ferry over to Fall River. Farther up the peninsula is Warren, with its factories. In Bristol rises the splendid isolated eminence of Mount Hope, which gives the bay its name. Its rounded summit is a mass of quartzite rock, almost covered by grass. It is hardly three hundred feet high, but being the most elevated spot anywhere around, has a grand outlook, every town in Rhode Island being visible from it, and all the islands of Narragansett Bay, while far to the southward, upon distant Aquidneck, Newport gleams in the sunlight. Eastward, across Mount Hope Bay, the city of Fall River, with its rising terraces of huge granite mills, is built apparently into the sloping side of a ledge of rocks. Upon this mountain lived the famous chief, King Philip, and from it, with his warrior band, he sallied forth to carry slaughter and rapine among the Puritan settlements. The eastern side of Mount Hope falls off precipitously to the bay, and when he was finally surprised by the colonists in his lair, he is said to have rolled down this steep declivity like a barrel. The mountain top is now known as "King Philip's Seat;" there is a natural excavation in the mountain side, called "King Philip's Throne;" and from the foot the waters of "Philip's Spring" flow away, a little purling brook, out to Taunton River. One disgruntled early colonial annalist described the place as "Philip's Sty at Mount Hope." The greatest tradition of this region tells of the ambush, surprise and death of this famous sachem, the "Last of the Wampanoags."
