Whenever the Reverend John Eliot walked along the Indian trail from Roxbury to Dorchester Mill in the autumn weather, he tried to put the time to proper use by continuing the metrical version of the Psalms that he and Richard Mather and Thomas Weld were working on. His somber figure pinpointed the brightness of the afternoon as he strode along, heedless of the crickets’ antiphonal shrilling. Late goldenrod and Michaelmas daisies encroached on the way. brushing against his cloak. Slowly, so very slowly, the Old Testament lines formed themselves in his mind:

But then, as had happened so many times before, he would find himself caught up in the immediacy of the sun-drenched moment, the shout of the crickets drowning out the psalm. And he would become aware again of sweet fern and the salt scent of the marsh and the harbor in the middle distance and the russet patches of oak and blaeberry. Lemon-pale witch hazel filaments, that New World shrub that (lowered so strangely in the autumn, came just on a level with his eye. Nova Anglia—New England. This, he now knew with loving thankfulness, was his world.

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