tide mills at the Cove, and was no doubt the capitalist of the trading firm of Symonds & King, who set up their “trucking house” as early as 1643 on the sunny slope of George Hill.  Symond’s widow a few months after his death married Isaac Walker, who in 1645 was prominent among the Nashaway proprietors.  If King really sold his share of the Indian purchase, may it not have been therefore because, his senior partner being dead, he had no means to continue the enterprise?  He too died before the end of the year 1644, not yet thirty years of age.  The inventory of his estate sums but one hundred and fifty-eight pounds, including his house and land in Watertown, his stock in trade, and seventy-three pounds of debts due him from the Indians, John Prescott, and sundry others.  King’s widow made haste to be consoled, and her second husband, James Cutler, soon appears in the role of a Nashaway proprietor.

The direction of the company was at the outset in the hands of men whose names were, or soon became, of some note throughout the Colony.  Doctor Robert Child, a scholar who had won the degrees of A.M. and M.D. at Cambridge and Padua, a man of scientific acquirements, but inclined to somewhat sanguine expectations of mineral treasure to be discovered in the New England hills, seems to have been a leading spirit in the adventure; and unfortunately so, since his political views about certain inalienable rights of man, which now live, and are honored in the Constitution of the Commonwealth, seemed vicious republicanism to the ecclesiastical aristocracy then governing the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay; and the odium that drove Child across the ocean, attached also to his companion planters, and perhaps through the prejudice of those in authority unfavorably affected for several years the progress of the settlement on the Nashaway.  Certainly such prejudices found expression in all action or record of the government respecting the proprietors and their petitions.  The ecclesiastical figure head—­without which no body corporate could have grace within the colony—­was Nathaniel Norcross.  Of him, if we can surmise aught from his early return to England, it may be said, he was not imbued with the martyr’s spirit, and his defection was, some time later, more than made good by the accession of the beloved Rowlandson.  But far more important to the enterprise than these two graduates from the English University—­Child the radical, and Norcross the preacher,—­were two mechanics, the restless planners and busy promoters of the company, both workers in iron—­Steven Day the locksmith and John Prescott the blacksmith.  Steven Day was the first in America, north of Mexico, to set up a printing-press.  The Colony had wisely recognized in him a public benefactor, and sealed this recognition by substantial grant of lands.  He entered upon the Nashaway scheme with characteristic zeal and energy, if we may believe his own manuscript testimony:  but Day’s zeal outran his discretion, and his energy devoured his limited means, for in 1644 we find him in jail for debt remonstrating piteously against the injustice of a hard hearted creditor.  He parted with all rights at Nashaway before many years and finally delved as a journey man at the press he had founded.