ers, William
Hazen and James White, also attended. While there they witnessed the
funeral of an Indian girl. The ceremony was a solemn yet simple one.
The body was borne into the chapel, the bell tolling the while; after
a short prayer they sang funeral hymns, that done some of the chiefs
bore the coffin to the grave where there was another prayer followed
by a funeral hymn. The coffin was then deposited in the grave and a
handful of earth cast upon it by the relatives and friends of her sex.
Immediately afterwards the family wigwam was struck and removed into
the thickest part of the village that the parents might be the better
consoled for the loss of their child.

The important services rendered by Father Bourg to government during
the American Revolution will be told in another chapter.

The first clergyman of the Church of England to visit the River St.
John was the Rev'd. Thomas Wood, a native of the town of New Brunswick
in the then British province of New Jersey. Mr. Wood went to England
in 1749--the year of the founding of Halifax--to be ordained by the
Bishop of London. He bore with him testimonials declaring him to be "a
gentleman of a very good life and conversation, bred to Physick and
Surgery." He became one of the missionaries of the Society for the
Propagation of the Gospel and was transferred from New Jersey to Nova
Scotia in 1753. Halifax and Annapolis were destined to be the chief
scenes of his labors, but he made frequent tours amongst the new
settlements.

Mr. Wood was an excellent French scholar and his gifts as a linguist
were of no mean order. While at Halifax he lived on terms of
friendship and intimacy with Antoine Simon Maillard, the missionary of
the Indians and Acadians. In the year 1762 Mr. Wood attended the Abbe
Maillard for several weeks during his last illness, and the day before
his death, at his request, read the Office for the Visitation of the
Sick in the French language in the presence of a number of Acadians,
who were summoned for the occasion by the venerable missionary. Mr.
Wood also officiated at the burial of M. Maillard, reading over his
remains in French the burial service of the Church of England in the
presence of "almost all the gentlemen of Halifax and a very numerous
assembly of French and Indians."

As the Indians were for the time being without any religious teacher
Mr. Wood resolved to devote much attention to them. He applied himself
diligently to the study of t