VI

verse readily in seven languages, besides having a passable knowledge of five others, ancient and modern. When, during the summer of 1849, he began in Charlottetown what was regarded as his own parti- cular work, he was a mature man of thirty-nine year‘s experience, during the latter ten of which he had been engaged in preaching the Gospel. Assured of support by the Micmac Missionary Society, he gladly devoted all his energies to the mastery of the Micmac tongue, then he toiled incessantly for the children of the forest, until forty-one years later he answered the summons which called him to his rest.

He began as he had opportunity to arrange his word-lists into a vocabulary, of which the English-Micmac portion was published at Halifax in 1888, and he attempted to classify his grammatical notes into more convenient form; receiving in this connection some useful suggestions from an article published by a Mr. Irwin, in the Prince Edward Island Royal Gazette, as well as from the works of the Abbe Legoyne of Clair, N. S. But his exacting missionary labours, as he tramped from camp to camp, were not conducive to regularly organized study of the language; his work is still preserved in a bound volume of some five hundred and thirty pages of manuscript, entitled “A Lecture on the Micmac and Maliseet languages,” the property of Wellesley College. He deals at length with the noun, pronoun, and part of the verb, observing with regard to the verb wiskogwodegd, I cookz—“A full and complete paradigm of this very verb would fill a volume. I once wrote upon it until I had set down a thousand words or more, and finding that I had only written a tenth part of the whole, I abandoned it as a bad job.”

Reading-books were prepared and published in Isaac Pitman’s phonetic method, and a large number of the Micmacs learned to read the Gospel translations which were widely circulated amongst them. The work of publishing the Bible in Micmac was carried on until the New Testament was issued complete, with the Psalms and the book of the Exodus, besides tracts too numerous to mention. A complete list of his works may be found in Pilling’s Bibliography, many of them are recorded in Miss Webster’s introduction to Rand’s Legends of the Micmacs, and a number may be found in the libraries at Wellesley