Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/455

Rh through the woods which he did more than any one else to make a road over hills and swamps and streams. The distance was eighteen miles. He was always laden with miscellaneous burdens. Though his own beverage was water, and his diet of the simplest, and he abhorred the use of tobacco, he was willing that the Indians should in some cases have wine; and he himself, after his professional work was done, distributed tobacco to the men, and apples and other little gifts to the pappooses. Probably some cast-off clothing from the backs of his own flock, with household stuff generally, formed a portion of his load. There are evidences that, like most fond and unselfish laborers for pets of their own fancy, he had acquired that exquisite art of begging gracefully from others, he himself dropping out in the solicitations.

Anything like the weakness of mere enthusiasm or overexpectation from his labors was all along provided against in his case by the lack of them in many others around him. The wordly-minded and “the ungodly” — and there were some such even in his Puritan community — ridiculed his schemes, and did what they could to thwart them so far as they would tend to protect the Indians against contemptuous treatment or injustice in trade. Even some of the sincerest yet narrowest sympathizers mistrusted lest Eliot's project was premature, as they thought the time had not been providentially reached “for the coming in of the fulness of the Gentiles.” The magistrates were cautious and often hesitating, and in many cases failed to carry into effect provisions of their own enactment designed for the benefit of the Indians. Though the Puritan missionaries, in the field of their effort, did not encounter such malignant and ingenious opposition as did the Jesuits from the powwows and sourcerers, — the Indian practitioners of divination and medicine, — they felt the effect of it, and had difficulty in reasoning it away. The Indians, whose whole resource for aid in their troubles and extremities had been