this friend of yours wishes to speak to you.”  As he approached one of the gentlemen rose and went off to another Indian encampment.  The one who remained with the chief had every indication in dress, manners, and language of being a Frenchman.  When Eleazar came near, this gentleman advanced several steps to meet him, embraced him most tenderly, and when he sat down again on the log made him stand between his legs.  In the meantime he shed abundance of tears, said “Pauvre garcon!” and continued to embrace him.  The chief was soon afterwards called to a neighbouring wigwam, and Eleazar and the Frenchman were left alone.  The latter continued to kiss him and weep, and spoke a good deal, seeming anxious that he should understand him, which he was unable to do.  When Thomas Williams returned to them he asked Eleazar whether he knew what the gentleman had said to him, and he replied, “No.”  They both left him, and walked off in the direction in which the other gentleman had gone.  The two gentlemen came again the next day, and the Frenchman remained several hours.  The chief took him out in a canoe on the lake; and the last which Eleazar remembered was them all sitting together on a log, when the Frenchman took hold of his bare feet and dusty legs, and examined his knees and ankles closely.  Again the Frenchman shed tears, but young Eleazar was quite indifferent, not knowing what to make of it.  Before the gentleman left he gave him a piece of gold.

A few evenings later, when the younger members of the household were in bed, and were supposed to be asleep, Eleazar, who was lying broad awake, overheard a conversation between the Indian chief and his squaw which interested him mightily.  The chief was urging compliance with a request which had been made to them to allow two of their children to go away for education; but his wife objected on religious grounds.  When he persisted in his demand she said, “If you will do it you may send away this strange boy.  Means have been put into your hands for his education; but John I cannot part with.”  Her willingness to sacrifice him, and the whole tone of the conversation, excited suspicions in the mind of the listener as to his parentage, but they soon passed away.  Mrs. Williams at last agreed that John, one of her own children, and Lazar, according to this story, her adopted child, should be sent to Long Meadow, a village in Massachusetts, to be brought up under the care of a deacon called Nathaniel Ely.  It is said that when the supposed brothers entered the village, dressed in their Indian costume, the entire dissimilarity in their appearance at once excited attention, and they became the subjects of general conversation among the villagers.  At Long Meadow the lads remained for several years, and are represented as having made “remarkably good proficiency in school learning,” as exhibiting strong proofs of virtuous and pious dispositions, and as “likely to make useful missionaries among the heathen.”  This encomium seems, however, to have been much more applicable to Eleazar than his companion; for, after the most persistent attempts, it was found impossible to cultivate the mind of John, whose passion for savage life was irrepressible, and who returned home to live and die among the Indians.  With Eleazar it was different, and his biographer proudly records that he was called familiarly “the plausible boy.”