reasoning on subjects that fired the heart. Logic was their opera and drama.

Mr. Eliot illustrates this great peculiarity of that time by proposing a school of logic and theology for the Indians of Natick. A logical Indian, with a keen perception of final causes and armed with a tomahawk, would be a new terror in Indian war. And I should distrust Sitting Bull and Spotted Tail as theologians.

My fair hearers will also be displeased, perhaps, that Mr. Eliot should class three things together, as distinguishing the "praying" from the "prophane" Indians, to wit: "howling; greasing their bodies; and adorning their hair.” But these are trifles in the life of the apostle to the Indians.

The Indian Bible has survived its earthly use. But the eye of love and reverence can still picture that devout and earnest teacher gathering the simple forest children together in the blessed land, leading them like children to the feet of Jesus, and singing the psalms of Israel in the plaintive Indian song, though the confusion of tongues is forgotten. He was pastor for sixty years, and sleeps, by the side of his old wife, in "the Minister's tomb," in the old buryingground on Eustis street.

From the first little church on this hill to Waltham Abbey, in the parish of Naseing, in the English County of Essex, is a long flight in space and time. John Eliot was born in the parish, perhaps near the ruins of the Abbey that carries us back on the stepping-stones of nine centuries to the founding there of a religious house by the standard bearer of the first Danish King of England.

Possibly, in the church of which this Abbey is a part, the sister of John Eliot, then a young thing, in 1618, was married to William Curtis, of the same parish, who came out here with his brother-in-law, "The Apostle," in the ship Lyon. In 1839 this William Curtis built the old Curtis house, that has stood by Stony brook for nearly two hundred and fifty years; always in the lineal possession of the same family, and which has seen every war in this country represented by one or more descendants of that first settler. The house is overshadowed by an elm which was planted as a sapling in 1775. It is the oldest house in New England.

Under its quaint roof, now stored with curious memorials of a far-off past, when deer were shot in the door-yard, and wolves were "killed on the Curtis farm," by which a hundred railroad trains run now, daily, a company of men, a hundred years ago, were quartered. A hundred and thirty years before that, John Eliot must have often sojourned there. It is said to have been used as head-quarters by Washington. The present occupant, Mrs. Isaac Curtis, who gave a husband and a son to the late war, has many relics of antiquarian interest. The future historical society of Roxbury may well be proud of this old home of a patriotic, puritan race; and the preservation of the building, intact, is a matter of public interest.

It seems strange, that before Gustavus Adolphus or Charles the Twelfth of Sweden were born, a Roxbury man should have ever commanded a company of foot at the siege of Amiens, under Henry of Navarre. Yet Thomas Dudley, the first Deputy Governor of Massachusetts, was the man.

Page to the Earl of Northampton, of kin to the Earls of Northumberland, steward for long years to the Earl of Lincoln, four times Governor and thirteen times Deputy Governor; he lived down here by the side of Smelt brook, where the Universalist Church now stands. Two sentences, from that life of him which Cotton Mather is supposed to have written, might be applied to the men of the Revolution: "A very wise man and knew how to express his mind in apt and gentle expressions." "Severe enough, but yet when matters were not clear he was slow to proceed to judgment, as most wise men used to be." Courage and constancy to the truth." "One that would not shrink therefrom, for fear of favor or hope of reward." One might think he was reading Deacon Gridley's town records of instruction to Joseph Williams, about taxation, a century later.

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Thomas Dudley's son Joseph, a Roxbury man, seemed to have a full measure of determined purpose and sweet ways. For he was Representative, Assistant, Agent, Commissioner, President of New England, Chief Justice of the Superior Court, Chief Justice of New York, Deputy Governor of the Isle of Wight, Member of Parliament, Captain General and Governor-in-Chief of Massachusetts Bay. Courtier of Queen Anne, and basking in favor, he was not of a revolutionary temper. But he seemed to have the qualities of purpose and manner which, if directed to a public cause instead of to private advancement, would have calmly, sagaciously and obstinately pushed the object to a successful end.

The third generation, which brings us down near the Revolution, presented, in Paul Dudley, a writer on Revelation, a theologian and a grand Chief Justice, whose career

was one of great dignity and power, a thorough example of the best transmitted traits of Puritan calmness and vigor.

That old polemic life has another example in that founder of this church, William Pynchon, whose entirely pious book on the sufferings of Christ was" ordered to be burned by the executioner." A nation, of logical faculties, intense convictions and patient self-control, was getting ready for 1776. The civil wars of England, the religious wars of France, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which flooded Europe and America with fugitives for religion's sake, kept the flame aglow. The Church and State in England were too closely connected to let the old despotism of church be forgotten when Parliament began to invade the colonial rights. The old chord vibrated again. But the Puritan habit of repressing intense emotion prevented premature revolt.

Even forty-five years ago some of the aged inhabitants about the country farms talked a little like old covenanters. The word "sanctuary" was used instead of "church,” and

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the house of God" almost always instead of "meetinghouse." Some of the old people talked with a sort of religious glow about the Britishers and Hessians as their ancestors had talked of the Antinomians and Cavaliers. Roxbury was very primitive then. Roxbury street concentrated the town life; all the rest was country. Walnut avenue, then Back street, was a narrow road, from the sides of which large coveys of quail would frequently start up. Forest Hill street, then called Jube's lane, had but one habitation upon it, a wretched collection of hovel and sheds, occupied by a Moorish-looking man, who kept swine,

and had a bevy of wild-eyed children. And in my childish rambles, as the squealing herd would come rattling through the dry leaves of the woodlands, followed by a troop of these screaming young Bedouins, I have imagined the terrors of Mungo Park in Central Africa, when his lonely path was crossed by savage tribes hunting the hippopotami.

There was a majestic tree upon the Williams homestead, near Walnut avenue. It was planted, perhaps, by the old settler of 1630, Robert Williams, whose descendants, as patriots and patrons of learning, have left the family name on the Declaration of Independence, on the corner-stone of Williams College, and on the battle-fields of the Revolution. A very ancient dame, mother of old men as they then seemed to me, told me that, under that tree, she had fed the soldiers of 1775 as they came from Lexington.

"Over her grave for forty years

The grasses have been growing."

But I have thought of that tree and of her, when, as one of hundreds of thousands of marching men, I have been fed by the loyal women of Philadelphia, who kept their halls open through the whole of the Rebellion; and I have thanked God for the apostolical succession of ministering angels to mankind.

There was on Warren street an old wooden house, black and shattered with more than a century of storms. A herd of cows that, I believe, were once stabled on the parlor floor, had found better quarters in the cellar — before the house was abandoned.

Many a time has my honored father stopped on our way