Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/445

Rh interests of the Indians by the Massachusetts Court, which in 1647 voted him a gratuity of ten pounds. Incidentally it should be mentioned that the early struggles and poverty of Harvard College found in that same society more efficient and needful patronage than has been generally recognized, in direct and indirect aid from its funds.

Eliot says that the first native, “whom he used to teach him words and to be his interpreter,” was an Indian who was taken in the Pequot wars, and who lived with Mr. Richard Collicott, of Dorchester. He took the most unwearied pains in his strange lessons from this uncouth teacher, finding progress very slow and baffling, and receiving no aid in it whatever from his skill in other tongues so differently constituted, inflected, and augmented. Though he is regarded as having gained an amazing mastery of the Indian language, he frequently, during the full half century of his work, avows and laments his lack of skill in it. We can pick out from his extant writings scraps of information about his difficulties and his mastery of them. His main dependence was upon securing the more intelligent, and, as he calls them, “nimble-witted” natives, young or grown, to live at his house in Roxbury, to be the medium of communicating to him words and ideas, to accompany him on his visits, and to be, with him, mutually teacher and learner.

Singularly enough, his greatest success was attained in a direction which we should have thought least likely, — namely, in his being able to convey to the Indians, through what seemed to be their own poor and scant vocabulary, spiritual ideas, truths, and relations. Mr. Shepherd, in his “Cleare Sunshine,” etc., paid him a beautiful tribute, when he wrote: “In sacred language, about the holy things of God, Mr. Eliot excels any other of the English that in the Indian language about common matters (trade, etc.) excel him.”

Quite different opinions were at the time expressed by