established the Society for propagating the Gospel in New England, and presently from voluntary contributions the society was able to dispose of an annual income of L2000.  Schools were set up in which agriculture was taught as well as religion.  It was even intended that Indians should go to Harvard College, and a building was erected for their accommodation, but as none came to occupy it, the college printing-press was presently set to work there.  One solitary Indian student afterward succeeded in climbing to the bachelor’s degree,—­Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck of the class of 1665.  It was this one success that was marvellous, not the failure of the scheme, which vividly shows how difficult it was for the white man of that day to understand the limitations of the red man. [Sidenote:  Missionary work:  Thomas Mayhew]

The greatest measure of success in converting the Indians was attained by that famous linguist and preacher, the apostle John Eliot.  This remarkable man was a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge.  He had come to Massachusetts in 1631, and in the following year had been settled as teacher in the church at Roxbury of which Thomas Welde was pastor.  He had been distinguished at the university for philological scholarship and for linguistic talent—­two things not always found in connection—­and now during fourteen years he devoted such time as he could to acquiring a complete mastery of the Algonquin dialect spoken by the Indians of Massachusetts bay.  To the modern comparative philologist his work is of great value.  He published not only an excellent Indian grammar, but a complete translation of the Bible into the Massachusetts language,—­a monument of prodigious labour.  It is one of the most instructive documents in existence for the student of Algonquin speech, though the Massachusetts tribe and its language have long been extinct, and there are very few scholars living who can read the book.  It has become one of the curiosities of literature and at auction sales of private libraries commands an extremely high price.  Yet out of this rare book the American public has somehow or other within the last five or six years contrived to pick up a word which we shall very likely continue to hear for some time to come.  In Eliot’s Bible, the word which means a great chief—­such as Joshua, or Gideon, or Joab—­is “mugwump.”

It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small Indian village near Watertown.  President Dunster, of Harvard College, and Mr. Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the undertaking.  These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines of America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might now be reclaimed.  With rare eloquence and skill did Eliot devote himself to the difficult work of reaching the Indian’s scanty intelligence and still scantier moral sense.  His ministrations