that ever I had; In my Affliction God made his Word Comfortable to me. Later renditions After Cotton Mather's death, Hannah Duston's story was largely forgotten until it was included in Travels in New England and New York by Timothy Dwight IV, published in 1821. After this, Duston became more famous in the 19th century as her story was retold by Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau's version adheres to information provided in primary sources, whereas Whittier describes her "thirst of revenge...an insatiate longing for blood. An instantaneous change had been wrought in her very nature; the angel had become a demon, —and she followed her captors, with a stern determination to embrace the earliest opportunity for a bloody retribution." Hawthorne, clearly horrified, pauses in his retelling to exclaim: "But, Oh the children! Their skins are red; yet spare them, Hannah Duston, spare those seven little ones, for the sake of the seven that have fed at your own breast." Duston's story entered popular imagination along with other tales of violent murder perpetrated by women, sold as cheap works of short fiction or portrayed on stage in productions intended to appeal to working-class crowds. The massacre was illustrated in theatrical style in Junius Brutus Stearns' historical painting, Hannah Duston Killing the Indians (1847) in which Stearns, for reasons that remain unclear, depicted Samuel Lennardson as a woman. The Indian children Duston killed are omitted. A second painting, showing Hannah's husband fleeing with her children, is now lost. Violent revenge against Native Americans was another popular subject of literature and theater, as in Robert Montgomery Bird's 1837 novel Nick of the Woods. From the 1820s until the 1870s, Duston's story was included in nearly all books about American history, as well as many biographies, children's books, and magazine articles. The story was popular among white Americans when the country was engaged in the westward expansion, which increased conflict with the Native American groups living in places where settlers wanted to live. In the 1830s and later, the story was partially sanitized by not mentioning the six children that Duston killed. Later versions of the story added numerous details (including dialogue and the names of the Indians) not found in any primary source, as in Robert Boody Caverly's Heroism of Hannah Duston (1875). Haverhill tradition, recorded in Mirick's History of Haverhill (1832), adds the details that Hannah was