most
instructive documents in existence for the student of Algonquin speech,
though the Massachusetts tribe and its language have long been extinct,
and there are very few scholars living who can read the book. It has
become one of the curiosities of literature and at auction sales of
private libraries commands an extremely high price. Yet out of this rare
book the American public has somehow or other within the last five
or six years contrived to pick up a word which we shall very likely
continue to hear for some time to come. In Eliot's Bible, the word which
means a great chief--such as Joshua, or Gideon, or Joab--is "mugwump."

It was in 1646 that Eliot began his missionary preaching at a small
Indian village near Watertown. President Dunster, of Harvard College,
and Mr. Shepard, the minister at Cambridge, felt a warm interest in the
undertaking. These worthy men seriously believed that the aborigines
of America were the degenerate descendants of the ten lost tribes of
Israel, and from this strange backsliding it was hoped that they might
now be reclaimed. With rare eloquence and skill did Eliot devote himself
to the difficult work of reaching the Indian's scanty intelligence and
still scantier moral sense. His ministrations reached from the sands of
Cape Cod to the rocky hillsides of Brookfield. But he soon found that
single-handed he could achieve but little over so wide an area, and
accordingly he adopted the policy of colonizing his converts in village
communities near the English towns, where they might be sequestered from
their heathen brethren and subjected to none but Christian influences.
In these communities he hoped to train up native missionaries who might
thence go and labour among the wild tribes until the whole lump of
barbarism should be leavened. In pursuance of this scheme a stockaded
village was built at Natick in 1651 Under the direction of an English
carpenter the Indians built log-houses for themselves, and most of them
adopted the English dress. Their simple government was administered by
tithing-men, or "rulers of tens," chosen after methods prescribed in the
book of Exodus. Other such communities were formed in the neighbourhoods
of Concord and Grafton. By 1674 the number of these "praying Indians,"
as they were called, was estimated at 4000, of whom about 1500 were in
Eliot's villages, as many more in Martha's Vineyard, 300 in Nantucket,
and 700 in the Plymouth colony. There seems to be no