Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/470

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In 1650 he writes, pleading earnestly for help to support an Indian school: —

There had been grammars and dictionaries of native languages in Spanish America, published a century before Eliot meditated a similar work. There are intimations in the correspondence of the Commissioners, as agents of the Society in London, that they feared he might be tempted to print some of his translations before he was sufficiently skilled in the native tongue, with its possible variations of dialect even with New England tribes. In a letter to him dated Sept. 18, 1654, they say: —

Eliot, in his sensitiveness, misapprehended the intent of this advice, for at the meeting of the Commissioners in the year following, in a reply to a letter from him, they say: