the two communions until their breath and patience gave out. When "forcibly pulled by the head and shoulders out of the wigwam into the church," he listened, smiling pityingly at the "great confusion, where there should be gospel order"; and when the holy fathers returned to the charge, met them with "what Christ said of the traditions of men." At the end of the controversy:

"I told them that it was my comfort that Christ was to be my judge, and not they at the great day. As for their censuring and judging me, I was not moved with it.”

Neither was he shaken when his master, with the fiery zeal of a proselyte, commanded him, tomahawk in air, to kiss a crucifix the savage had pulled from his own neck. "And seeing I was not moved, threw down his hatchet, saying he would first bite off all my nails if I refused. He set his teeth in my thumb-nail, and gave a gripe, and then said, No good minister, no love God, as bad as the Devil; and so left off."

Again, in Montreal, he did not blench in the fire of polemics and persecution, and wrangled valiantly with the Jesuits in Quebec over the dinner with which they hoped to mollify him.

The crucial test was applied when the Superior of the Jesuits, after eight months of the captivity had dragged by, offered to restore his children to him and provide an honorable maintenance for them and for him if he would abjure his faith.

With the reply, the lofty intrepidity of which touches sublimity, I shut the priceless little book:

'I answered, 'Sir, if I thought your religion to be true, I would embrace it freely without any such offer, but so long as I believe it to be what it is, the offer of the whole world is of no more value to me than a BLACKBERRY.""

Italics and capitals are his own.

N company with fifty-seven of his flock, out of the hundred and twelve who were carried into captivity with him, on that black February 29, 1704, Mr. Williams arrived in Boston on November 21, 1706. The colonial authorities, backed by the Home government, had not ceased to labor for their ransom during all these dreary and painful months, and the capital city received him with open arms.

Two of his children returned with himSamuel and Esther. Stephen had been ransomed a year before; Warham was restored to his father's arms in 1707,-" having entirely lost the English language, and could speak nothing but French." Eleazar, who had es

caped captivity by his temporary absence from Deerfield, had been cared for by friends in his father's absence, and was now at Harvard. Of the missing Eunice we shall hear more and somewhat at length presently.

The minister delayed his return to Deerfield for more than a month, naturally enough, it seems to us. Inured as he was to calamity, and complete as was his justification of the ways of God, he was but a man, and the scenes attending his departure from home were sufficiently vivid in memory without the harrowing associations that must be awakened by revisiting the spot. Within ten days after his arrival in Boston he was waited upon by a committee from the Deerfield church, armed with a unanimous call to him to renew his work among them. This committee no doubt formed a part of the great crowd that packed the "Boston Lecture" on December 5, 1706, to hear "A Sermon by John Williams, Pastor of the Church of Christ in Deerfield soon after his return from captivity."

The text was double-headed :

"Psal. cvii., 13, 14, 15, 32.

666

He saved them out of their distresses. He brought them out of darkness, and the shadow of death; and brake their