Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/474

454 terms in the Scriptures, by simply using the Bible word and adding an Indian termination. A story has obtained currency, that when Eliot was rendering the passage in Judges v. 28, where the mother of Sisera is said to have “cried through the lattice,” after much perplexity to find an Indian word for lattice, he adopted one given him by a native, which, to his amusement and regret, he afterwards found signified “an eel-pot.” The story is a fiction. In both editions of his Old Testament the word lattice is rendered latticent, — the English fitted with an Indian termination, though it is said that the word is Indian for “eel-pot” by haphazard. It is in evidence, too, that the Indian teachers and preachers found it easy and pleasant to use his Bible for all the purposes for which, with such zeal and toil, he had labored upon it. References are frequent, many years after, in the decaying Indian towns, to copies of the book which showed the same tokens of having been conned and pored over with the reverential affection lavished upon the English book in Puritan households. Eliot made two catechisms, one for younger and one for older scholars. He also provided a simple Indian primer. He translated some of the Psalms into Indian metre, which are said to have been “melodiously improved” by his disciples in their worship. His translations of Baxter's “Call” (1664) and of the “Practice of Piety” (1665), the former undertaken at the request of the Hon. Robert Boyle, were in the same service of the style of Puritan religion into which he would train his converts. After his grammar appeared, the use of it must have furnished facilities alike for teachers and pupils. It would seem that two editions were printed of most if not of all his works.

By a letter from the Secretary of the Society in London, of date May 18, 1661, the Commissioners were informed that under the new order of things, in the restoration of the monarchy, the Parliament's Corporation was dissolved by