Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/454

434 from Mounsier Delabout, Governor and Leftenant for the King of France, in the flood St. Lawrence.” The Commissioners were quite ready to enter into friendly relations for trade, but were chary of any entanglements in matters of war.

There was matter enough on which the two ministers of Christ could converse together. Possibly there might have been seated by the fireside one or more of those inmates of his family of the native stock whom Eliot continued to turn to his own help in the language. That language and its dialects as compared with tongues more familiar to Druillettes, and a statement by Eliot of the approaching culmination of his plans in an Indian town, may well have been the topics of the interview.

The experiment at Natick, as it was the first of a series of such made with degrees of completeness in several places, was from the beginning, and through its whole development and trial, under the especial care of Elliot. There was not in him a particle of assumption or self-assertion in magnifying his cause, or in insisting upon his own authority or opinion. All along he sought to secure and to deserve the intelligent advice and the hearty co-operation of the magistrates, ministers, and leading men; and he sometimes yielded his own judgment or preference to conciliate and avert variances. There was a stage in the experiment when his well-guarded and moderate hopes seemed to have the promise of being crowned with fair success. The records of his own church and the traditions of his ministry in Roxbury prove that he most, faithfully performed there all the laborious routine duties of a teacher and pastor in those days, in Sunday and Lecture service, in catechising, in administering discipline, and in constant oversight of the members of families in their various relations, with cares for the sick, the sorrowing, the dying, and bereaved. His rule was to visit Natick once a fortnight, riding there in all weathers, on his own horse, by paths