as if he could not address heaven in a language both strange and new. And then he preached for an hour in their own tongue, and gave a clear and simple account of the religion of Christ, of his character and life, of the blessed state of those who believed in him. Of what avail would it have been to set before this listening people the terrors of the Almighty, and the doom of the guilty? This wise man knew, by long experience as a minister, that the heart loves better to be persuaded than terrified-to be melted than alarmed. The whole career of the Indian's life tended to freeze up the finer and softer feelings, and make the more dark and painful passions familiar to him. He resolved to strike a new chord, and when he saw the tear stream down their stern faces, and the haughty head sink low on the breast, painted the ineffable love of Christ, he said it was a glorious and affecting spectacle to see a company of perishing forlorn outcasts, so drinking in the word of salvation.' The impressions this discourse produced, were of a very favourable nature: as far as the chief, Waubon, was concerned, they were never effaced. Afterwards the guest passed several hours conversing with the Indians, and answering their questions. When night came, he returned to the tent with the chief, and the people entered their wigwams, or lay down around, and slept on the grass. What were Eliot's feelings on this night? At last, the longing of years was accomplished; the fruit of his prayers was given to him.

as he

66 Could the walls of his loved study speak,' says his friend, they would tell of the entreaties poured forth before the Lord, of the days and nights set apart with

were retired. One of the Christians perceived an Indian, who was hanging down his head, weeping; the former went to him, and spoke encouraging words, after which he turned his face to the wall, and wept yet more abundantly soon after, he rose and went out. When they told me of his tears,' said Eliot, we resolved to go forth, and follow him into the wood, and speak to him. The proud Indian's spirit was quite broken at last we parted, greatly rejoicing for such sorrowing.' He now resolved to continue his labours; but, on the 26th of November, when he met the assembly of the Indians for the third time, he found that, though many of them had constructed wigwams at the place of meeting, for the more readily attending his ministry, his audience was not SO numerous as on the former occasions. The Powaws (or soothsayers) had strictly charged the people not to listen to the instructions of the English, and threatened them with death in case of disobedience.* Having warned his auditors against the impositions of these men, he proceeded to discourse as formerly, and was heard with the greatest attention. • It is wonderful,' observed one of his friends, to see what a little light will effect, even upon hearts and spirits most incapable.'

'On the night after this third meeting, many were gathered in

The Indians had a very high idea of the power of these Powaws. On a subsequent occasion, an Indian exclaimed, There is not any man who is not afraid of the Powaws! The eyes of all were immediately fixed on Hiaccomes, a Christian convert, who rose from his seat, and undauntedly declared his firm trust in God, who controlled them all. The Indians, astonished at his bold defiance, waited, expecting his death. Hiaccomes improved the opportunity by exhorting them ear

be.' A few of the chiefs' friends alone remained, after the people

blessed his efforts, so that twenty of the Indians were converted to the faith of Christ.

the tent, looking earnestly at Eliot, with the solemn gravity and stillness which these savages affected; when the chief, Waubon, suddenly rose, and began to instruct all the company out of the things he had heard that day from Eliot, with the wild and impressive eloquence of the desert. And waking often that night, he many times was heard speaking to some or other of his people, of the words of truth and mercy that he had heard.

Two or three days after these impressions had been made, Eliot saw that they were likely to be attended with permanent consequences. Wampas, an intelligent Indian, came with two of his companions to the English, and desired to be admitted into their families. He brought his son, and several other children with him, and begged that they might be educated in the Christian faith: the example quickly spread, and all the Indians who were present at the fourth meeting, offered their children to be instructed.

"The missionary was himself surprised at the success of his first efforts, as well as at his facility of preaching and conversing in the Indian tongue; it was the reward of his long and patient application. To think of raising,' says Mather,

these hideous creatures unto the elevations of our holy religion, must argue a more than common or little soul in the undertaker: could he see any thing angelical to encourage his labours?

-all was diabolical among them.' 'Eliot saw that they must be civilized ere they could be christianized; that he must make men of them, ere he could hope to see them saints. It is, no doubt, far easier and more flattering to the soul of the agent, to see men weep and tremble beneath his word, than to teach them to build, to plant, to rear the walls and the roof-tree, and sit at their own

hearth-side this is slow and painful work for a man of lofty mind and glowing enthusiasm. But in his own words, he abhorred that he should sit still, and let that work alone;' and lost no time in addressing himself to the General Court of the colony, in behalf of those who shewed a willingness to be placed under his care. His application was successful; and the Indians, having received a grant of land on which they might build a town, and enjoy the Christian instruction which they desired, met together, and gave their assent to several laws which he had framed, to enforce industry and decency-to secure personal and domestic comfort.

The ground of the town having been marked out, Eliot advised the Indians to surround it with ditches and a stone wall; gave them instruments to aid these objects, and such rewards, in money, as induced them to work hard. It was a strange and novel thing to see these men of the wilderness, to whom a few months previous all restraint was slavery, and their lakes and forests dearer than the palaces of kings, submit cheerfully to this drudgery of bricks and mortar-chief as well as serf; the very hands that were lately red with slaughter, scooping the earth at the bidding of Eliot, from morn to night. He soon had the pleasure of seeing Nonanetum completed.

• The progress of civilization which followed, was remarkable for its extent and rapidity: the women were taught to spin, and they soon found something to send to the nearest markets: in winter they sold staves, baskets, and poultry; in spring and summer, fish, grapes, strawberries, &c.

'In the mean while, he instructed the men in husbandry, and the more simple mechanical arts: in hay-time and harvest, he went forth into the fields with them. All this was not done in a day,

for they were neither so industrious nor so capable of hard labour as those who had been accustomed to it from early life.

It was very early in the morning,' says a stranger, ' when I passed by this newly-raised town: its people seemed to be buried in sleep, for no sound came from the dwellings, which surprised me not a little, for the sun was risen. At last I saw an old man kneeling on the grass outside the walls, his hands were clasped, and he was so engaged that he heard me not: going on my way, I saw that the people were at work in the fields.'

At a funeral, on the 7th of October, 1647, a change in the usages and prejudices of the Indians was evinced in a striking manner. The deceased was a man of some consequence. Their custom had been to mourn much for the dead, and to appear overcome with grief, especially when the earth shrouded them from their sight. The departed was borne to the grave ou a light bier, and interred in a sitting posture; in his hand was placed a calumet and some tobacco, that he might present the ensigns of peace to the people of another world. If the corpse was that of a warrior, his quiver full of arrows, a bow, and a hatchet, were placed by his side, and also a small mirror, that he might see how his face looked after passing through the region of death; with a little vermilion to take away its extreme paleness. His was a bold hand that could at once tear aside these loved usages, and make the dust of the warrior of no more consequence than that of the meanest of his followers. The cemetery of the new town was in the woods, and the procession of all the inhabitants moved slowly beneath their shadow, in deep and solemn silence, with the missionary at their head: no wail was heardno wild gush of sorrow. To estimate this sacrifice, it is necessary

nor

to recur to the Indian belief, that after death they should go to a very fertile country, where they were to have many wives, and, above all, lovely places for hunting: often, no doubt, the shadowy chase of the bear and the stag came on the dreams of the dying man; and afterwards, beautiful women would welcome him, weary, to his home. When the dead was laid in the grave, Eliot read the funeral service over him, and then told the many people, that in heaven they neither married nor were given in marriage; that the passions of this world, the wild chase or the warrior's joy, could never come there; there was neither chieftain slave; that in the love of Christ, who was the resurrection and the life, all these things would be lost. And they believed him-those fierce and brutal men-and wept, not for the dead, but for themselves; so that the woods,' says a gentleman who was present, 'rang with their sighs and prayers: ' he also adds these words,- God was with Eliot, and the sword of his word will pierce deep, in the hand of the mighty.' His opinion of the mental powers of this people was not a very low one :- There is need,' he says, in one of his letters, of learning, in ministers who preach to Indians, much more than to Englishmen and gracious Christians; for these had sundry philosophical questions, which some knowledge of the arts must help to give answer to, and without which they would not have been satisfied. Worse than Indian ignorance hath blinded their eyes, that renounce learning as an enemy to gospel ministers.' So acute were many of the questions proposed by the Indians, and so deeply expressive of a gentler and better nature, that more than one educated stranger was induced to attend regularly the assemblies of the missionary.

'The civilizing of the Indians in this new town raised a great noise

among their brethren in different parts of the country. A sachem, from Concord, who attended one of the lectures, was so much struck with it, that when he returned home, he gathered his chief men together, and informed them of his intentions on the subject; that he was resolved to forsake his barbarous habits; he pointed out the increased comfort of the change, and entreated them to support his views. He was so far successful, that they expressed a desire to have a town granted to them, where they might settle, and entreated Eliot to visit them as often as he could. The regulations which they adopted for the management of their affairs, and which were dated at Concord in the end of the eleventh month, 1647, were very judicious. They strictly prohibited intemperance, impurity, and gambling; threatened murder and adultery with death; enjoined neatness, cleanliness, industry, and the payment of debts.'

The American Indians were like other savages, men of strong passions, warm and faithful friends, bitter and revengeful enemies; they delighted in hunting and in war, and gloried in sustaining the severest torments of their enemies without shrinking. Their character is strikingly exhibited in anecdotes like the following :

When the French were in possession of New Orleans, a Chactaw, speaking very ill of them, said the Collapissas were their slaves; one of the latter, vexed at such words, killed him with his gun. The nation of Chactaws, the greatest and most numerous on the continent, armed immediately, and sent deputies to New Orleans to ask for the head of the murderer, who had put himself under the protection of the French. They offered presents to make up the quarrel, but the cruel people would not accept any! they even threatened to destroy the village of the Col

lapissas. To prevent the effusion of blood, the unhappy Indian was delivered up to them: the Sieur Ferrand was charged with the commission. The Indian was called Tichou; he stood upright in the midst of his own people and of his enemies, and said, 'I am a true man, that is, I do not fear death; but I pity the fate of a wife and four children, whom I leave behind me very young; and of my father and mother, who are old, and for whom I got subsistence by hunting.' (He was the best hunter in the nation.)

'He had hardly spoken the last word of this short speech, when his father, penetrated with his son's love, rose amidst the people, and spoke as follows:

It is through courage that my son dies; but, being young and full of vigour, he is more fit than myself to provide for his mother, wife, and four little children, it is therefore necessary he should stay on earth to take care of them. As to myself, I am near the end of my career; I am no longer fit for anything I cannot go like the roebuck, whose course is like the winds, unseen; I cannot sleep like the hare, with my ears never shut; but I have lived as a man, and will die as such, therefore I go to take his place.'

'At these words, his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and their little children, shed tears round the brave old man: he embraced them for the last time. The relations of the dead Chactaw accepted the offer; after that, he laid himself on the trunk of a tree, and his head was cut off with one stroke of a hatchet. Every thing was made up by this death; but the young man was obliged to give them his father's head: in taking it up, he said to it, Pardon me thy death, and remember me in the country of spirits.''

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To a people like this, who valued strength of limb, and a fine

mien and deportment, above all other gifts, a weak bodily presence "would have placed a stranger at great disadvantage. Nature had been eminently kind to Eliot; he was of a tall stature, with a countenance very expressive of the undying energy and charity of his soul. He was able to bear the greatest fatigues and hardships without sinking; through frost and snow, in the dead of winter, and along howling wastes, he went on his way rejoicing. • For five days,' he says, in one of his letters, his clothes were never dry once, or taken off all that time.' Next to bodily gifts, and, perhaps, above them, the Indians prized eloquence: they would listen for hours, with the wild delight of children, to the speeches of those of their warriors who could speak well.

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'And here their missionary was on his vantage ground; in his church, at Roxbury, his delivery was solemn, powerful, and graceful; the "unsearchable riches of Christ was the beloved theme of his discourses. But when he would earnestly reprove sin,' says his friend, his voice, otherwise grateful, rose with the fervour of his feelings, and made his pulpit like another Mount Sinai, for the flashes of lightning therein displayed against the breaches of the law.' His influence over their minds was certainly astonishing; and the 'simplicity of his intentions, the ardour of his spirit, and his dependence on divine aid,' were, no doubt, not a little assisted by the appearance of the outward man and his

eloquence and power in preaching increased, perhaps, almost unconsciously to himself.'

While thus labouring, God graciously vouchsafed to crown his efforts with great success. 'The sound of the Word,' he says in one of his letters, had by this time spread a great way, even farther than I will speak of.

There is a great fishing place upon one of the falls of the Merrimack river, where a vast number of Indians come every spring, and there I have gone these two years. These confluences are like fairs in England, with their great gladness, covering the shores, and pursuing their sport amidst the fierce rushing down of the river. This spring I did there meet the great sagamore Passaconway; last year he and all his sons fled when I came nigh their dwellings; but this year it pleased God to bow his heart to hear the Word.'

Near this water-fall he dwelt, by the river side, among the Indians, waiting the pauses of their games and fishing, to draw them around him. He mixed cheerfully and familiarly with them, partook of their repasts, that were never too rude for his taste, and led them gently and artfully to converse on his beloved subjects as well as on their own. I preached,' he writes, 'from Malachi, i. 2. whence I shewed them what mercy God had promised them; if they would but believe in Christ for the remission of their sins, he would give them a heart to love him. When I had done speaking, they began to propound questions. After a good space, in which Passaconway seemed to be lost in thought, he spake to this purpose:- Indeed I have never prayed unto God as yet, for I have never heard of Him before, as now I do. I am purposed in my heart henceforth to pray to Him, and to persuade all my sons to do the same.' His sons present, especially his eldest, who is a chief at Wachaset, gave his willing consent to what his father had promised, and so did the other, who was but a youth. A good while after, he spoke to Captain Willard, who trades with them in those parts for beaver and other skins, that he would be glad if 1 would come and live at some place thereabouts; if any ground or