on of most of the people of that time. His name was Ezekiel
Cheever. When a young man of twenty-three years, he came from
London--where he was born January 25, 1614--to Boston, seven years after
its settlement. The following spring he went to New Haven, where he soon
married, and became actively engaged in founding the colony there. Among
the men who went there the same year was a Mr. Wigglesworth, whose son,
in later years, as the Reverend Michael Wigglesworth, gave an account of
Mr. Cheever's success in the work of teaching, which he began soon after
reaching the place. "I was sent to school to Mr. Ezekiel Cheever, who at
that time taught school in his own house, and under him in a year or two
I profited so much through y'e blessing of God, that I began to make
Latin & to get forward apace."

Mr. Cheever received as a salary for two or three years twenty pounds;
and in 1643, while receiving this salary, his name is sixth in the list
of planters and their estates, his estate being valued only at twenty
pounds. In the year following, his salary was raised to thirty pounds
a year. This probably was an actual necessity, for his family now
consisted, besides himself and wife, of a son Samuel, five years old,
and a daughter Mary of four years. Ezekiel, born two years before, had
died. This son, Samuel, it may be said in passing, was graduated at
Harvard College in 1659, and was settled as a clergyman at Marblehead,
Massachusetts, where he died at the age of eighty-five, having been
universally esteemed during his long life.

Besides being the teacher of the new colony, Mr. Cheever entered into
other parts of its work. He was one of the twelve men chosen as "fitt
for the foundacon worke of the church." He was also chosen a member of
the Court for the plantation, at its first session, and in 1646 he was
one of the deputies to the General Court. It is supposed that during
this time he wrote his valuable little book called The Accidence. It
passed through seventeen editions before the Revolution. A copy of the
eighteenth edition, printed in Boston in 1785, is now in the Boston
Athenaeum. It is a quaint little book of seventy-two pages, with one
cover gone, and is surely an object of interest to all loving students
of Latin. A copy of the tenth edition is found in Harvard College, while
it has been said that a copy of the seventh is in a private library in
Hartford, Connecticut. The last edition was published in Boston in 1838.