to have intermitted his labours in carrying spiritual and
temporal succour to his people, and in endeavouring to keep the peace
between them and the English.

The hard winter had had a great effect in breaking the strength of the
enemy, and they were much more feeble on the renewal of the war in the
spring. The good conduct of the praying Indians had overcome the popular
prejudice so much that it was decided to employ them to assist the scanty
forces of the English in hunting down the hostile tribes, and Gookin
boasts of their having taken and slain more than 400 foes in the course
of the summer of 1676, which one would scarcely think was very good for
their recent Christianity. In the mean time, the absence of all the able-
bodied men and hunters reduced their families to such distress that
serious illness broke out among them, and Major Gookin caused them to be
brought to the neighbourhood of Cambridge, where there was good fishing,
and where he could attend to them, and provide them with food, clothing,
and medicine.

In August Philip was killed, the English believing themselves to "have
prayed the bullet straight into his heart;" and his head was carried
about on a pole, in a manner we should have called worthy of the Indians
themselves, did we not recollect that there were a good many city gates
at home with much the same kind of trophy, while his wife and
children--miserable fate!--were, like many others of the captives, sold
into slavery to the sugar planters in Jamaica.

After this the war did not entirely cease, but the Christian Indians were
allowed to creep back to their old settlements at Nonantum, and even at
Natick, where Mr. Eliot continued periodically to visit and instruct
them; but after this unhappy war there were only four instead of fourteen
towns of Christian Indians in Massachusetts, and a blow had been given to
his mission that it never recovered.

Still there was a splendid energy and resolution about this undaunted old
man, now writing a narrative of the Gospel History in his seventy-fourth
year, now sending Robert Boyle new physical facts, now protesting hard
against the cruel policy of selling captive Indians into slavery. What
must not the slavery of the West Indian isles, which had already killed
off their native Caribbeans, have been to these free hunters of the North
American forest, too proud to work for themselves, and bred in a climate
of cold, dry, bracing air? And even in the