III.

JOHN ELIOT AND HIS INDIANS.

TO MRS. FREDERIC INGHAM-DEAR POLLY: I understand what you say, and I have read between the lines. That tall Polly of yours will be at meetings of "Colonial Dames " and "Daughters of the Pyrates," and I do not know what other conclaves, when she gets home, and she wants to talk literature. She will want to say that she has seen the home of this author and walked in the footsteps of that.

Dear child, she shall. And you and I will lead her.

She knows, and you know and I know, that the first absolutely first-rate work done in a literary way here was John Eliot's work —the dear Indian apostle. He was really a very remarkable man. Do you know that

when the great linguists of this century got to work, the people we call philologists now, the Grimms, the Duponceaus, the Brintons, and the rest of them, when they buckled down to old John Eliot's studies of the Indian language they found he understood his business as well as the best of them, and did as clean and thorough a bit of work as ever was done? That speaks pretty well for his Jesus College, at Cambridge, and pretty well for the grit of the dear old fellow himself.

Nobody has any excuse for ignorance now, for Eliot's admirable successor, one of to-day's apostles, Dr. De Normandie, has written out all Eliot's history. I have the paper before me as I write, and I shall send it to your Polly. This letter, in fact, is all taken from it. You will find it in the New England Magazine, where there is so much else which a traveler values.

It is only as far as the little statue in a niche, where Roxbury Street leaves Washington Street, that you will follow Percy's march, where you went when you were seek

ing battle memories. And now practically your "Eliot pilgrimage" will be over new ground. Look at the little statue in the niche-remember that Percy took the road to the right, and do you go to the left as far as the People's Bank. A little behind the People's Bank stood the parsonage where John Eliot lived from the month of November in the year 1632, when he came to be "teacher" of the First Church in Roxbury, where Thomas Weld had already been chosen "minister and pastor." Young Eliot had graduated at the English Cambridge in 1623, having studied at Jesus College. Let us hope that that society knows enough to count him in the front company of its noblest sons. Eliot had married, only the month before, the lady whom he called his "ancient dearly beloved wife" fifty-three years afterward.

While your husband goes upstairs to the bank to ask for change for a bill, you can "dilate with the right emotions," as Mr. Choate said. You and the children can look northward to the new block of stores, where

Mr. Norton has his furnace and stove shop. On that corner General Artemas Ward, the first commander of the Continental army, had a little fortification, the guns of which commanded the street over which you have come, so that the English could not come out. To build this, Ward pulled down the house of Thomas Dudley, the second governor of the colony, kinsman, perhaps, of Leicester and Amy Robsart. I say perhaps, because I do not know, nor does any one else.

Now I am not going to instruct you about methods of travel. Who am I, to decide between a Columbia and a Crescent, and I dare say those boys and girls of yours will all expect to take the wheel. As it is John Eliot we are tracing along, you will do well to go up Warren Street far enough to see the Latin School which he founded, which is on Kearsarge Avenue, a little off Warren Street. We call it the best classical school in America, and we are very proud that John Eliot is its founder.

But do not "dilate" with the wrong emo

tion because it is on Kearsarge Avenue. Do not say "How fine it is to give an Indian name to the street where is John Eliot's school!" Kearsarge Avenue is so named, very properly, for Admiral Winslow's ship, the "Kearsarge." He fought that fine ship when she sank the "Alabama," and his house was in this street. Kearsarge was and is the name of a mountain in New Hampshire. Ships, by the way, should never be named from mountains, which can not move, but rather from rivers, which can. Andes is a bad name for a ship, and Niagara is a good one. Kearsarge is not an Indian name. The hill in New Hampshire was the property of one Hezekiah Sargent, familiarly called "Kiah Sargent." This name, for short, became "Keah-sarge," and the mountain is so named to this day, and the ship from the mountain and the street from the ship. I tell this to you, dear Polly the younger, because we will study John Eliot's Massachusetts language as we go, and I do not want you to hunt for any impossible ety